were to their lives in general. As a next step, participants then used coffee beans to indicate why the
ecosystem products were important to them (e.g. because they can directly use them).
Photo credit: Birhanu Bekele Negash, Dadi Feyisa Demu
By Maria Brück, Jannik Schultner, Birhanu Bekele Negash, Dadi Feyisa Damu, and David J. Abson.
To make more sustainable and equitable decisions, it is important to understand which aspects of nature are important to people and why. In this paper, we wanted to understand how important different ecosystem products (specific products, such as coffee, appropriated from ecosystems) are to people in southwestern Ethiopia and why. To do this, we asked people in different villages and one town to rank 11 different ecosystem products by how important they are to them. We also collected data on people’s gender, wealth and occupation (specifically, are they farmers or not?), where and how they lived, and why the ecosystem products were important to them.
We learned that ecosystem products are important to people because they can directly use them or connect to other people through them, whereas selling them was less important. We were able to split the participants into five different groups. Each group ranked different ecosystem products more highly, and gave different reasons why they were important. The groups did not differ in their gender or wealth, but they did differ based on their occupation, and the context in which they lived. For example, people who thought that coffee and honey (which are both produced in the forest) are more important than other ecosystem products mostly lived in villages with lots of forest.
Decision-making in Ethiopia should consider that people differ in how they rank ecosystem products, and in the reasons for this ranking. It is also important to recognize that, in general, selling ecosystem products is less important to people than being able to directly use them.
Relational Thinking 