Restoration in South Africa

Abstract

Restoration can provide a wide range of direct and indirect benefits to society. However, there are very few projects that have attempted to properly quantify those benefits and present them in such a way that society is motivated to invest in restoration. Describing and quantifying these benefits requires people who understand ecosystems and their restoration, as well as people who know how to assess benefits. However, it is not a matter of simply combining knowledge. We need to understand how differently our sciences view the world and organise their knowledge of it. For example, ecologists are concerned about how ecosystems function and how their restoration may be affected by their history, location and context. Economists are more interested in flows of goods and services to and through society and less so in where things are. Developing the shared understanding needed to provide a thorough and sound assessment of the benefits requires us to find (a) ways of linking the information that ecologists provide to the benefits that economists can value and (b) ways of sharing these benefits with society. Restoration is one example of the very complex problems faced by society. There are many such problems that will require co-operation between disciplines and the active participation of society in the search for the solutions. There is a clear message in this: the era when single disciplines and scientists alone found solutions is rapidly passing. Scientists, government, industry and society need to work together to find and implement solutions. Together we can do much better than we can do individually.