4.1: Material Contributions
Nature’s material contributions to people, also called provisioning services, commodity values or direct use values, represent contributions derived from the direct extraction and physical consumption of natural resources (Figure 4.1). This category is often the most visible and marketed of all ecosystem services. Also, because of their important contribution to the economy, economists are often interested in calculating the values of material contributions and associated services, which they do by monitoring the cost of each product at several points along its life cycle, as well as the behaviors of target groups of people.
Material contributions can be subdivided into four subcategories. The first subcategory is energy resources, such as firewood and biofuels. The second is food resources, such as drinking water, bushmeat, and edible fruit. The third is materials, companionship, and labour, which include natural products used to make clothes, ornamental resources used for decorations, and animals used for biomedical research, as pets, and for labour. The fourth is medicinal, biochemical, and genetic resources, which include medicinal plants used to cure ailments, psychoactive fungi used in spiritual ceremonies, and genetic stocks used to improve crops.
Many people, especially those in rural areas, obtain many of the material contributions they need for survival from the surrounding environment. These products, which include bushmeat, perfumes from aromatic plants, and firewood, are often assigned to consumptive use values. In contrast, material contributions that are sold at commercial markets, whether locally or internationally, are assigned to productive use values. Because of material contributions’ importance in sustaining people’s material assets and health, it is important to ensure that these products are sustainably harvested (Box 4.1).
Katharine Abernethy 1,2 and Lauren M. Coad 3
1 Biological and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences,
University of Stirling, UK.
2 Institut de Recherches en Ecologie Tropicale, CENAREST,
Gros Bouquet, Libreville, Gabon.
3 CIFOR, Jalan CIFOR Situ Gede,
Sindang Barang Bogor (Barat) 16115, Indonesia.
A major threat to wildlife in Africa is hunting. Subsistence hunting has been practiced for thousands of years, but new technologies allow hunters to have higher impacts than they had in the past. Improved access routes and vehicles allow hunters to cover more ground and sell to a greater client base, while habitat encroachment from logging or agriculture squeezes wildlife into smaller areas. Growing human populations are pushing the overall demand for wildlife products to a level that the remaining fauna simply cannot support. Yet wild meat is a critically important resource in rural Central Africa, so managing hunting is an important issue for conservation and human welfare (Coad et al., 2010).
Our 20-year research program looked at hunting in Central Africa to determine how conservation may be most effective. We studied how human communities rely on hunting, impacts of hunting on wildlife and ecosystems, law enforcement challenges, and alternative practices. We found that across Central Africa hunters are in the poorer sections of society and hunt for very similar reasons: food and income. In rural villages, most able-bodied men hunt, but usually < 10% of men make most kills and have disproportionately important impacts on wildlife. These hunters have invested most in equipment and local assets; thus, they have the most to lose and are resistant to regulations or alternatives. The more successful a hunter, the more meat he sells (Coad et al., 2013). Only around 40–60% of hunted meat is consumed directly within the community; smoked or frozen meat can be traded up to 1,000 km away. Even remote villages now trade meat as a commodity to buy supplies such as fuel and medicines.
Under subsistence-driven hunting, studies show that larger-bodied species ( 20 kg) are targeted first. As these decline, smaller species are hunted (Ingram et al., 2015). During this process, the wildlife community changes and, as large predators, browsers, and seed dispersers are lost, ecosystem functioning is compromised (Abernethy et al., 2013).
Commercial hunting often targets illegal trophies, which is only lucrative if hunters have access to clients. These illegal hunters are often recruited directly by the buyer and local people may not necessarily participate, or even benefit at all. If profits are high, hunters can access better weaponry and surveillance than law enforcers, making them difficult and dangerous to apprehend. In the past 20 years, species such as elephants, rhinoceros, lions, and gorillas, have suffered drastic declines that authorities have not been able to combat.
Although wildlife protection laws are generally strong in the region, law enforcement is underfunded and complex. Commercial hunting is regulated but subsistence hunting is allowed, making the identification of illegal hunting difficult as most hunters sell only part of their catch. Alternative livelihood projects have been promoted in the hope of reducing hunting without complex enforcement. However, our review of these projects shows negligible impact, as they have generally been on a small scale and were often unreliable in generating better revenues than hunting (Wicander and Coad, 2015).
Our research shows that the effective regulation of hunting is desperately needed to preserve Central Africa’s ecosystems and the sustainability of rural communities. This will require balancing law enforcement and long-term community outreach with policy interventions—such as lobbying—to change laws or awareness campaigns. A conservation practitioner tasked with trying to manage hunting should ask who hunts, why they hunt, where hunting pressure is greatest, and how hunting affects the local ecosystem in order to determine whether they are tackling a subsistence issue or a commercially-driven one, and from there to decide which strategies could be used and who the interventions will affect. This will help to ensure planning for fair, long-term solutions, which have broad local support and the best chance of success.