Managing Water Scarcity to Encourage Sustainable Economic Growth and Social Development in South Africa

Environmental Services: A New Approach Toward Addressing Sustainable Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Management of environmental resources (Figure 3) is commonly framed in terms of sustainable development (Hallowes et al, 2008;Cumming et al, 2017;Falayi et al, 2019;Wolff et al, 2019), but an alternative viewpoint is where socioecological processes between people and the environment are also considered (e.g., Bowd et al, 2015;Ramos-Mejía et al, 2018;Fedele et al, 2020;Herrfahrdt-Pähle et al, 2020). Here, human activity can be viewed as either an integrated element of the Earth system and synergistically influencing ecological processes and ecosystem services through feedback processes (Swemmer et al, 2019;Musakwa et al, 2020a;Ragie et al, 2020), or as an external driver of irreversible environmental change and degradation (D'Alessandro and Zulu, 2017;Schmiedel et al, 2017;Ashukem, 2020).…”

“…Several studies have examined how communities make use of environmental resources in their immediate localities, illustrating the local-scale relationships of people to their surrounding environments (e.g., Hoffman et al, 2007;Casale et al, 2010;Thondhlana and Muchapondwa, 2014;Cole et al, 2017;Omisore, 2018;Falayi et al, 2019;Ragie et al, 2020). These relationships have often been examined in the context of resource sustainability, by which the use of certain environmental resources is evaluated over time with respect to changes in resource properties and their availability (e.g., Hallowes et al, 2008;Swemmer et al, 2019;Wolff et al, 2019). However, this analysis of relationships between different communities and environmental resources is usually based on localized and individual case studies.…”