Ecosystem Approach for Sustainable Natural Resources Management: A Review

Abstract

This paper is aimed to analyse the priority targets, scales and stakeholders’ involvement in an ecosystem approach on natural resources management. It is an obvious that absolute anthropocentric and eco-centric views on human-nature relationship have been degraded natural resources. Because, the former perspective argues that nature exists exclusively to serve humanity; and they have ignored the natural limits to societal use of nature. On the contrary, the latter perspective treats humanity as ‘just another species’ with no higher value attached to their needs; and they heavily excluded human beings from nature. However, without the existence of one aspect in an ecosystem it is meaningless to the other aspects, because every elements of an ecosystem are highly interlinked to form a functional unit. In addition, an ever increasing of population growth, land use change, lack of tenure security, poverty, climate change, human settlement and others anthropogenic activities are also adversely impacts on natural resources and altering the functioning of an ecosystem.  So that, ecosystem approach was emerged early as a central strategy for the Integrated Natural Resources Management that promotes conservation and sustainable use through equitable sharing of benefits. At the global level, Convention on Biological Diversity has been provided the operational guidelines and principles which can and should be applied to any decision-making processes. The author also recommended it to change this typical approach into the practical paradigms.

Keywords: natural resources management, ecosystem approach, principles, priority targets, scales, stakeholder involvement.