Space cannot substitute for time in the study of the ecosystem services-human wellbeing relationship

Abstract

The relationship between ecosystem services (ES) and human well-being (HWB) is fundamental to the science and practice of sustainability. However, studies have shown conflicting results, which has been attributed to the influences of indicators, contexts, and scales. Yet, another potential factor, which has been overlooked, may be the mixed use of spatial and temporal approaches. Using twelve ES and seven well-being indicators and multiple statistical methods, we quantified and compared the spatial and temporal ES–HWB relationships for Inner Mongolia, China. The spatial and temporal relationships differed in both correlation direction and strength. Most relationships of economic and employment-related indicators with food provisioning and supporting services were temporally positive but spatially nonsignificant or negative. Some relationships of economic and employment-related indicators with water retention, sandstorm prevention, and wind erosion were temporally negative but spatially complex. However, the spatial and temporal ES–HWB relationships could also be similar in some cases. We conclude that although both the spatial and temporal approaches have merits, space generally cannot substitute for time in the study of ES–HWB relationship. Our study helps reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings in the literature, and suggests that future studies should explicitly distinguish between the spatial and temporal ES–HWB relationships.

Keywords

Ecosystem services / Objective human well-being / Space-for-time substitution / Spatial relationship / Temporal relationship

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lumeng Liu: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Jianguo Wu: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank Yuanyuan Zhao, Wenfeng Chi, Quanqin Shao, and Haibo Huang for providing data for this study. We also acknowledge the data support from the National Earth System Science Data Center, National Science & Technology Infrastructure of China (http://www.geodata.cn), and the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (http://data.tpdc.ac.cn). This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. B240201068), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42361144861), and the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB954303).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.08.002.

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