Climate change resilience : exploring socio-ecological system resilience for livelihood effects of climate change in peri-urban areas

Ecosystem services are increasingly regarded as having the potential for building resilience to the effects of climate change in urban and peri-urban areas. Despite this, the knowledge of ecosystem services typologies aligned with analysis of how they might contribute in building resilience for specific effects of climate change is largely lacking, especially in peri-urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. This lacuna explains in part the limited mainstreaming of ecosystem services into climate change resilience pathways. The overarching aim of this Thesis is to investigate the potential contribution of cultural and provisioning ecosystem services in building resilience for the livelihood effects of climate change in peri-urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa from a socio-ecological perspective. The Thesis analyses two progressive case studies, which have been complementing each other at different levels of both empirical and theoretical analysis. Empirical data was collected via a systematic literature review, key informant interviews, focus group discussions and household surveys. The results were analysed following socio-ecological system resilience thinking, using adaptive capacity as the analytical frame. The results show that literature is largely silent on the contribution of the cultural and provisioning ecosystem services in building resilience for climate change effects in peri-urban areas, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the investigated case for socio-ecological system adaptive capacities it was revealed that the case has considerable resilience-building potential aligned to cultural and provisioning ecosystem services. These include: ecological knowledge (ethnic diversity, promising literacy rates, and diverse age cohorts), economic diversity (bee keeping industry, tourism industry in its multiple forms i.e. food tourism, arts and crafts tourism and nature tourism). It also showed that social milieu constitutes an important adaptive capacity towards building socio-ecological system resilience for the livelihood effects of climate change in peri-urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is substantiated by the analysed synergies between bonding and bridging social capital on the one hand and the identified cultural and provisioning ecosystem services based adaptive capacities towards building win-win-win resilience for the livelihood effects of climate change. The Thesis contributes to knowledge on the potential contribution of cultural and provisioning ecosystem services in building effective resilience for livelihood effects of climate change in periurban areas. The results are revelatory and thus will invoke similar research elsewhere