Sharing Ecosystem Services

Sharing of resources, goods, services, experiences, and knowledge is one of the fundamental practices that has been widely embedded in human nature. The advance of information and communication technology has contributed to significant growth in the “sharing paradigm.” In spite of the increasing attention on the new sharing phenomenon and its potential contribution to a sustainable and resilient society, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of varied sharing practices in the context of sustainability and resilience. This chapter starts mapping out the academic landscape of sharing studies and examines what and how we share by a systematic literature review. The chapter also discusses research gaps in sharing paradigm studies and the potential contribution of sharing to building sustainable and resilient societies. The chapter reviews how sharing ecosystem services and shared/social values of ecosystem services have been captured by recent ecosystem services assessments including regional assessments conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Finally, the chapter illustrates the objectives and organization of the book.

In rural areas of Japan—places where the natural environment and people’s livelihood activities have worked in concert over many years to create a diversity of sustainable practices and products—it has been empirically well known that pervasive practices like sharing or gifting home-based agricultural products with neighbors and relatives are embedded in social structures and principles of reciprocity. The objective of this chapter is to understand a general trend of home-based food consumption and social links associated with use of natural resources quantitatively in municipal level. We conducted web questionnaire survey collecting information from over 1500 respondents throughout Japan and found that (1) people share diverse agricultural products grown in their own homegardens, (2) the amount of such shared products consumed in household was significantly higher in rural municipalities compared with urban municipalities, and (3) social connections relating to use of natural resources were stronger in rural municipalities. These results suggest that self-production and sharing practices substantially relate to human nutritional well-being and social relations, especially in rural areas. The findings could also provide basic information to increase regional resilience by ensuring food availability in emergencies, which are, for example, caused by climate change, natural disasters, or social changes such as aging and shrinking populations.

Satoyama is a Japanese term for a socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLSs) with mosaic of ecosystems along with human settlements that have been managed to produce bundles of ecosystem services for human well-being. Although sharing of food provisioning service (mentioned in this chapter) in SEPLSs may substantially promote human well-being by not only maintaining nutrition but also building social relations, few studies have investigated the sharing practices by relating quantities and varieties of homegrown food to localized landscapes. The objective of this chapter is to characterize the quantity and varieties of home-based food consumed per household at the community level and to discover how food is shared in social relations. We conducted face-to-face questionnaires and interviews on Japan’s Noto peninsula and found that (1) households in inland and coastal satoyama communities consume greater varieties and quantities of food grown at home than households in semi-urban community; (2) the varieties and quantities correlated positively with the number of sharing partners, indicating that households with more connections to other households consume greater food varieties and quantities; and (3) rural households primarily share food within their communities, while among semi-urban households, social connections beyond their communities, particularly connections to rural communities, enhance non-market food consumption. However, urbanization and globalization in recent decades have weakened such sharing practices. Balancing market and sharing mechanism in food provisioning services would be one of the key challenges to build localized models of sustainable society in harmony with nature.

The resource consumption pattern of remote islands is assumed to differ from that of the mainland because of the constraints of both material distribution and human interaction. This study investigates food production and consumption patterns of remote islands with a focus on the food supply flow, a food-sharing network, and food stock for emergencies. The study uses a household questionnaire survey and interviews with the residents of Hachijo Island, Tokyo. We find that sharing food provisioning services plays an important role by sustaining roughly half of the total food consumption during the high cropping and harvesting season of agricultural and marine products. A large proportion of the islanders’ annual consumption of potatoes, vegetables, seafood, and fruits are obtained through the food-sharing network. Non-market food largely saves the household budget and provides calories and a wide variety of nutrients. The results also indicate that many households own additional deep freezers to store food product, which are then shared and exchanged with neighbors and relatives on Hachijo Island. Based on the findings from Hachijo Island, we discuss the potential role, opportunities, and challenges of this food-sharing culture to build an island resilient to natural disasters and socioeconomic changes.

In order for ecosystem services to actually flow and provide benefits to people, knowledge of managing the supply and realizing the flow of ecosystem services is necessary, although that knowledge appears to have been disappearing at an accelerating pace. Sharing the traditional and local experiences and associated knowledge of ecosystem services is thus crucial for sustainable use of ecosystem services. In this chapter, we document a case of sharing experiences and associated knowledge in the Mikatagoko (Five Lakes of Mikata) area in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Elementary school students in the area interview the local adults about the past waterscape, biodiversity, and ecosystem services that they experienced, and then the children draw a painting of the past waterscape and experiences of the adults. This environmental-educational program, named the Painting by Children of the Past Waterscape program, is arranged by the local NGO (Hasu Project), and all the paintings are collected and exhibited at public spaces and in the web site to be shared in and outside the local community, as well as being used for community-based workshops to promote further sharing. The analysis of 986 paintings collected between 2009 and 2014 revealed that diverse experiences with organisms inhabiting and ecosystem services from the local rivers and lakes were shared through these activities among the local children and adults. The children learned what they have otherwise never happened to know in the modern waterscape that has changed from the past, although the paintings cannot be used to make simple comparisons between the past and the present waterscape as the paining also reflects the social context of the past. The experiences and knowledge shared through the program and associated activities were perceived as new discoveries by children and as rediscoveries by adults, suggesting that the potential of ecosystem services from the local rivers and lakes were recognized and shared in these out-of-the-ordinary opportunities. In that sense, this program in the Mikatagoko area has been making important contributions to the management of ecosystem services from a variety of perspectives shared in the local community.

Socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPLs) face numerous projected and unprecedented pressures amid changing social, economic, and environmental conditions. The use of diverse knowledge systems, including the transmission and sharing of traditional knowledge, to achieve mutually beneficial human-environment relationships, fosters the sustainable use of natural resources, promotes biodiversity conservation, and determines new methods to efficiently manage SEPLs, which can increase the adaptive capacity of local communities. To illustrate how the timely and regular transmission of traditional knowledge can promote the sustainable management of ecosystems and their services in complex SEPLs, this chapter presents the status and trend of the transmission and sharing of knowledge on non-timber forest products in two rural study sites in Japan. It also examines the factors, including motivations and incentives, that shape knowledge systems in these locales. The case study on apiculture in Nagano shows that beekeepers’ ecological knowledge should be transformed from tacit to explicit and shared beyond the family unit for the benefit of future generations, while the case study on Shiitake mushroom production in Ishikawa reveals that farmers’ traditional production knowledge and experience should be combined with modern production techniques to meet new quality standards. By understanding these elements and processes, relevant policies and activities could be developed and implemented, especially since new agents are frequently needed to increase the resilience of SEPLs.

The shared economy features a wide gap between the new digital sharing phenomenon and traditional communal sharing practices. This study examines the value of traditional sharing practices and discusses how new digital technologies can harness it. The study examines the use of marine and terrestrial natural resources through subsistence activities over 10 years in the Republic of Palau, Micronesia, and compares their frequency with the use of digital devices. The results show that the frequency of subsistence fishing, farming, and collecting has not substantially changed over 10 years in either urban or rural areas and that there is no relationship between the frequency of subsistence activities and digital technology use, despite the rapid spread of mobile devices. These findings indicate that nonmarket-based subsidence economies that rely heavily on local natural resources have not been completely replaced by a globalized monetary economy. Traditional practices in Palau use common natural resources and hand down the practical and empirical knowledge required to manage them in sustainable ways. Despite the many changes brought by external influences, these traditional communal sharing practices are still rooted in Palauan culture. This culture of sharing is the medium that sustains the healthy relationships between humans and ecosystems and can play a key role in building climate change resilience. It is thus desirable to employ the new digital technologies to pass traditional communal sharing practices down to future generations rather than just use them to do what they are used for in industrialized countries.

Solidarity economy is often focused on autonomous initiatives outside the regular market system. In Brazil, the leftist national government during the 2000s has supported a number of solidarity economy initiatives by institutionalizing the ideal and practices of sharing and sustainable production and consumption within the regular market system. New actors, policies, and procedures have been instrumental in this institutionalization. However, the questions of how the actors, policies, and procedures interact and how the interaction becomes socially and politically relevant remain largely unaddressed. In this chapter we will explore implications of the interactions for the establishment of solidarity economy based on agroecological practices carried out by small family farmers in Brazil. We firstly give an overview of the national context in which the agroecological practices were linked to the practice and economy of sharing. We then analyze cases of the Program of Food Acquisition in the south of Brazil and agroforestry systems in the Amazon region in order to highlight different patterns of the involved actors’ interaction and eventual articulation of solidarity economy in relation to the promotion of sustainability. The chapter concludes by discussing the linkage between actors at different levels, new institutional arrangements, and monetary and nonmonetary values added to the solidarity economy.

Socioecological production landscapes (SEPLS) are multifunctional and substantially contribute to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provisions. Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is a policy tool that incentivizes landholders in production landscapes through voluntary and performance-based conservation contracts towards creating SEPLS that benefit all societies living within landscape. The design of PES covers explicitly defining ecological baselines of targeted landscape, calculating conservation opportunity costs, customizing contract agreement and payment modalities, and targeting agents with credible land claims and threats to ecosystem service degradation. Reverse auction represents a method to efficiently allocate contracts for the provision of ecosystem services in PES schemes. The PES gains allocative efficiency as contracts are allocated to the lowest-cost providers of ecosystem services through competitive bidding. In the context of developing countries, conservation contracts of PES scheme are mostly assigned to farming groups. Thus, a group-level auction was organized to accommodate collective decision-making in payment level for the scheme. This chapter is to discuss how group-level auctions enhance allocative efficiency due to sharing process during the auctions compared to the individual-level auction. A group auction allows exchanging and sharing knowledge, information and conservation values among farmer group members. The analysis shows that by allowing the group members to communicate with each other, sharing knowledge and value happened. This knowledge and value sharing encompasses how they understand the competitive bidding process, how their bids can influence the overall outcomes of winning or losing the conservation contracts, and the most importantly, how farmers share their conservation values as agricultural conservation efforts of PES not only benefit the external actors but also co-benefits themselves. This chapter presents the results from a PES pilot in Rejoso watershed, Indonesia, where smallholders in the up- and midstream are contributing to better watershed services, i.e. water infiltration and sedimentation reduction, to benefit downstream domestic and industrial water users.

Peri-urban landscapes are fast changing with the loss of its own characteristics and transforming into a new landscape with new mosaic set of characteristics that are strikingly different from the previous. There is an increasing trend across the world to transform these peri-urban areas, just outside the periphery of bigger cities, into satellite towns so that they can accommodate the city’s increasing population as well as be a development hub attracting more business and development for the area. In this study, a survey was carried out with the local communities inhabiting in village pockets inside a newly developed satellite town in the peripheries of Kolkata, one of the four metropolitan cities of India. The study enquired how the local communities perceive about sharing their land with the new residents living in high-rise apartments and how the change in the status of home gardens and sharing of its produce has changed the social relationships in the area. Majority of the respondents were found to be not happy and/or satisfied about sharing their place with the new residents as land acquisition to develop the city has resulted in loss of livelihood and income for them. The difference in sociocultural aspects was also found to be major contributor behind the gap between new and old residents in the area. The home garden status of the area has also significantly changed as most of the households have lost their property. The sharing of produce among neighbors, family members, and others in the community has also declined that results to loss of social relations.

Sharing is a trending issue, and there is a swiftly growing interest in the sharing paradigm, sharing economy and its various opportunities, challenges and impacts. While new sharing practices mediated via Internet platforms are already established in urban contexts, discussions and practices in rural, landscape and ecosystem contexts are still in the very beginning. This chapter analyses a particular type of sharing, i.e. web-mediated cow sharing in the European Alps, which are hotspots of diverse and vulnerable ecosystems. We compared 60 cow-sharing arrangements from Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France and Italy based on the conceptual models of sharing and property rights. They constitute new farmer-consumer relations mediated via digital platforms. Usually in exchange for a payment, farmers share different rights to individual cows with consumers, such as rights to consume their products (i.e. milk, cheese, meat), rights to cow-related experiences (farm and cow visits, exploring Alpine pastures, milking a cow) or other intangibles (i.e. tacit knowledge, learning about Alpine farming and nature). Consequently, the farmers involved are sharing cow-related access and withdrawal rights, but usually not management, exclusion or alienation rights or risks, such as a cow’s illness or death. The analysis illustrates that cow-sharing practices can contribute to the delivery of provisioning services (food with identity and traceable origin) and cultural ecosystem services (recreational and learning experiences, conservation of traditional breeds). We conclude that cow-sharing activities might hold the potential for establishing new forms of direct producer-consumer relations promoting adaptive and conscious production and consumption practices. So far, however, it is too early to draw final conclusions as to whether cow sharing actually contributes to the conservation of Alpine ecosystem services or whether it is rather a commercialization of consumers’ concerns regarding animal welfare and sustainable food production via new web-based direct marketing channels.

This book has extended the scope of the sharing paradigm (McLaren and Agyeman, Sharing cities: a case for truly smart and sustainable cities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015) beyond urban governance, filling the knowledge gap between sharing economies (which have been increasingly studied in recent years) and sociocultural communal sharing practices (which are less well understood). Previous chapters have provided a wide range of sharing case studies from around the world. This chapter revisits and summarizes all case studies from Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 and identifies the positive and negative effects of sharing practices on sustainability and resilience. It also proposes three key approaches toward a sustainable and resilient future: (1) combination of traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge/technologies; (2) coexistence of market and nonmarket sharing mechanisms; and (3) new normative metrics for measuring the multiple values of sharing. Along with new information and communication technologies, web-based platforms, and smartphone applications, the sociocultural communal sharing and exchanging of goods and capital can enhance the mutual satisfaction of people’s interests without compromising the sustainability and resilience of social–ecological systems (SES).