A framework to assess the role of ecosystem services for human well-being of Australian savannas

Abstract

The northern part of Australia, tropical savannas region, is very important for production and cultural values. For production, grazing, mining, and use of natural resources by indigenous people for food, medicine, and for art and craft are the main benefits of savannas. Currently, grazing as the dominant land use has depleted land resources and raised concerns for their sustainable future use. Similarly, mining has contributed to depletion of natural resources. Thereby, ecological-economic evaluation of various current land use options (grazing, mining, conservation and indigenous land use) in savannas is important to understand their role in human wellbeing. It is also helpful to analyse land use practices that could sustain land resources for furute use. The paper presents a conceptual framework to assess the benefits of ecosystem services from various land uses for human well-being, while considering the positive and negative externalities of each land use. The economic value of each land use (monetary and non-monetary) will be used to estimate tradeoffs among various land uses, and to model data for optimal use of land resources to promote mutliple use of savanna landscape. This cenceptual framework highlights the importance of ecosystem services from different uses of land for human well-being and thus could be very useful for policy matters to develop land use systems that sustain the land resources for future use.