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Supporting small farmer livelihoods in fragile, biodiverse regions, such as tropical forests, is a priority for many development agencies and national governments. These regions tend to be characterized by recent human settlements, increasing populations and infrastructure development, as well as competitive land use activities, which exert pressure on fragile ecosystems. Improvement in livelihood strategies often focuses on increasing yields by improving productivity, but without taking into account alternative methods, such as better agricultural practices and their dependence on agrochemical inputs, changing land use through crop substitution, or improving product commercialization. In this research, we use household types, defined according to different land use patterns, in the Northern Amazon region of Ecuador to explore the limitations of, and identify future options for, improving livelihood strategies based on small-scale coffee and cocoa production. The results of the different types are discussed in order to highlight the methods' utility and identify benefits in terms of environmental and social objectives versus economic profitability. Lessons are drawn that could be useful in applications of public policy aimed at the betterment of small coffee grower and cocoa farmer livelihood strategies, which involve thousands of families in the Amazon region of Ecuador, without compromising the environment.

article i nfo This paper reviews the historic development of the conceptualization of ecosystem services and examines critical landmarks in economic theory and practice with regard to the incorporation of ecosystem services into markets and payment schemes. The review presented here suggests that the trend towards monetization and commodification of ecosystem services is partly the result of a slow move from the original economic conception of nature's benefits as use values in Classical economics to their conceptualization in terms of exchange values in Neoclassical economics. The theory and practice of current ecosystem services science are examined inthelight ofthis historicaldevelopment.From thisreview,we conclude thatthefocus onmonetary valuation and payment schemes has contributed to attract political support for conservation, but also to commodify a growing number of ecosystem services and to reproduce the Neoclassical economics paradigm and the market logic to tackle environmental problems.

This paper proposes an approach to environmental accounting useful for studying the feasibility of socio-economic systems in relation to the external constraints posed by ecological compatibility. The approach is based on a multi-scale analysis of the metabolic pattern of ecosystems and societies and it provides an integrated characterization of the resulting interaction. The text starts with a theoretical part explaining (i) the implicit epistemological revolution implied by the notion of ecosystem metabolism and the fund-flow model developed by Georgescu-Roegen applied to environmental accounting, and (ii) the potentials of this approach to create indicators to assess ecological integrity and environmental impacts. This revolution also makes it possible to carry out a multi-scale integrated assessment of ecosystem and societal metabolisms at the territorial level. In the second part, two applications of this approach using an indicator of the negentropic cost show the possibility to characterize in quantitative and qualitative terms degrees of alteration (crop cultivation, tree plantations)for different biomes (tropical and boreal forests). Also, a case study for land use scenarios has been included. The proposed approach represents an integrated multi-scale tool for the analysis of nature conservation scenarios and strategies., Comment: 29 pages including 6 figures