Wells, HBM orcid.org/0000-0001-5463-9297, Kirobi, EH, Chen, CL et al. (5 more authors) (2021) Equity in ecosystem restoration. Restoration Ecology, 29 (5). e13385. ISSN 1061-2971
Abstract
The importance of equity has been emphasized in climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and ecosystem restoration. However, equity implications are rarely considered explicitly in restoration projects. Although the role of equity has been studied in the context of biodiversity conservation and environmental governance, environmental variables are often ignored in equity studies, and spatial analyses of equity are lacking. To address these gaps, we use a mixed methods approach, integrating spatially explicit ecological and social data to evaluate, through an equity lens, a restoration project in a semi-arid rangeland socioecological system in Kenya. We use questionnaires and semi-structured key informant interviews to explore four dimensions of equity: distributional, procedural, recognitional, and contextual. Our results show that restoration employment and distance to the restoration site strongly influence perceived distributional and procedural equity. Employment and distance to restoration site can interact in counterintuitive ways in their influence on aspects of perceived equity, in this case, the fairness of site selection. Our findings exemplify that equity dimensions are intimately linked, and trade-offs can occur between equity dimensions, across socio-temporal scales, and in choosing the ethical framework to apply. Our work demonstrates how restoration is influenced by different dimensions of equity and we opine that incorporating equity in project planning and implementation processes can improve restoration outcomes. We emphasize the importance of respecting plurality in the values systems and ethical frameworks that underlie what is considered equitable, while negotiating trade-offs between diverse ethical positions in the design and implementation of ecosystem restoration projects.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Authors. Restoration Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Ecological Restoration. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Apr 2022 15:29 |
Last Modified: | 22 Apr 2022 15:30 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/rec.13385 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:185990 |
Download
Filename: Restoration Ecology - 2021 - Wells - Equity in ecosystem restoration.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0