Impacts of Societal Development on the Evolution of Ecosystem Services in the Heihe River Basin, China

Human activities through changes in land and water use have led to increase in provision ecosystem services (ESs) but decrease in some regulating, supporting, and cultural services in the past thousands of years. The impact of land and water use on different types of ESs has been extensively studied, but it has not been directly linked to its societal drivers, thus failed to explain the societal root cause of ES degradation. This paper aims to examine the impacts of 3 generic societal drivers: societal value, institutional governance, and science and technology development on the evolution of ESs in the Heihe River Basin, China since 2000 years ago. Water provision, food provision, groundwater maintenance, climate regulation, and environmental flow maintenance were examined as the major ESs. Content analysis method was used to track the change of the 3 societal drivers from various textual documents. It was found that there were strong trade-off relationships between food provision and groundwater maintenance in midstream and the environmental flow maintenance services in downstream. The slow-changing and independently developed societal drivers failed to adaptively respond to the increasing food provision demands while addressing the significant decrease in groundwater and environmental flows. It is concluded that rational water (re)allocation and use are the prerequisites of balanced development of different categories of ESs and linking societal development to the benefits humans obtain from ecosystems is the prerequisite for sustainable ES management.