A systematic review of cultural ecosystem services and human wellbeing

Aleksandra Kosanic and Jan Petzold

Ecosystem Services, 2020, vol. 45, issue C

Abstract: Environmental degradation is increasing globally through direct anthropogenic interventions, such as urbanisation and unsustainable land use, and human-induced drivers, such as climate change. A result is the loss of ecosystem services. The way humans benefit from diverse ecosystem services for their physical and mental wellbeing differs from place to place and between communities and social groups. While the existing research on ecosystem services is rich on the relevance of provisioning ecosystem services for human wellbeing, the role of cultural ecosystem services is not sufficiently understood. Moreover, a variety of methods and a wide range of approaches are adopted to study how landscapes provide ecosystem services and how important they are for different people. Therefore, this paper systematically reviews where and how cultural ecosystem services are studied explicitly with respect to aspects of human physical and mental wellbeing and various social groups. Our review provides an overview of research biases and gaps that need to be addressed to advance our understanding of this link, which is critical to implementing meaningful environmental conservation and protection for local communities and vulnerable populations.

Keywords: Non-material services; Wellbeing; Health; Landscape; Systematic review; Vulnerability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041620301108
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:45:y:2020:i:c:s2212041620301108

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101168

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

More articles in Ecosystem Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().