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The investigation of the views of the stakeholders involved in the municipal solid waste separate collection programme (CP) performed in the East Zone of the city of São Paulo is presented in this paper. Aiming to obtain the necessary information to be analysed, interviews with the manager of the Municipal Urban Cleaning Authority (MUCA) of the city, with leaders of recycling worker cooperatives (WCs), and citizens were performed using semi-structured questionnaires. The analysis was performed using the software "IRAMUTEQ". The results show that, in the view of the manager of the MUCA of the city and the WCs' leaders, the low adhesion of the population to the separate CP is the greatest obstacle to a further expansion of the existing programme. At the same time, the citizens have blamed the low diffusion made by the municipality about the separate CP in the East Zone of São Paulo. Thus, it can be concluded that the separate CP available in the East Zone of São Paulo is still flawed; since neither the public power, the WCs, nor the population are satisfied and point out several flaws. This situation highlights the need to establish better venues for discussion between the population, WCs, and the municipality to jointly design a separate collection system with a more participatory approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Usumacinta floodplain is an exceptional area for biodiversity with important ecosystem services for local people. The main objective of this paper was to estimate reference values and define local perceptions of ecosystem services provided by wetlands and overlapping them with spatially explicit socioeconomic and biodiversity indicators. We used the Usumacinta floodplain as an example of a territory where high dependence of rural people on ecosystem services is confronted with development projects that threat the flow of ecosystem services, thus affecting rural people well-being. With a combination of data from remote sensing, global databases of ecosystem service values, local perception of ecosystem services and socioeconomic and biodiversity richness indicators in a spatially explicit framework, we develop a policy-oriented approach for rapid assessment to manage wetlands and maintain people's livelihoods. Regulating and provisioning services are identified as the most relevant ecosystem services in terms of their monetary value and local perceived importance. In a spatially explicit manner, this approach highlights the most valuable wetlands and identifies rural societies that are highly dependent on ecosystem services. Our approach can be replicated elsewhere and could provide valuable information for policymakers to design policies that can contribute to conserve wetland ecosystems where under threat of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social media represent an extensive, opportunistic source of behavioral data and revealed preferences for ecosystem services (ES) analysis. Such data may allow to advance the approach, scale and timespan to which ES are assessed, mapping and valued. This is especially relevant in the context of developing regions whose decision support tools are often limited by a lack of resources and funding. This research presents an economic valuation tool for recreational ES, suitable at wide spatial scales, relying on crowdsourced metadata from social media with a proof of concept tested on an Indian tropical Ramsar wetland. We demonstrate how geotagged photographs from Flickr can be used in the context of a developing country to (i) map nature-based recreation patterns, (ii) value recreational ecosystem services, and (iii) investigate how recreational benefits are affected by changes in ecosystem quality. The case-study application is the Vembanad Lake in Kerala, India, and the adjacent backwaters. Geographic Information Systems are implemented to extract 4328 Flickr photographs that are used to map hot spots of recreation and infer the home location of wetland visitors from within Kerala state with good accuracy. An individual, single-site travel cost demand function is generated and estimated using both Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions, which results in mean consumer surplus estimates between Rs. 2227–3953 ($34–$62) per visit and annual domestic recreation benefits of Rs. 7.53–13.37 billion ($115.5–$205 million) in the investigated wetlands. Improvement in water quality to a level that supports wildlife and fisheries is projected to result in a Rs. 260 million ($4 million) annual increase in recreational benefits, while restoring previously encroached lake area would result in almost Rs. 50 million ($760,000) in yearly value increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letter to the Editor [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]