Effects of Global Household Proliferation on Ecosystem Services - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 99

Chapter 6
Effects of Global Household Proliferation
on Ecosystem Services

Jianguo Liu

Abstract Population sizes and growth rates are two major factors used by ecol-
ogists in assessing human impacts on ecosystems and landscapes. However, the
numbers of households have been increasing much faster than population sizes. As
households are basic socioeconomic units (e.g., in consumption of ecosystem
services) and key components of coupled human and natural systems, household
proliferation has important implications for ecosystem services. On one hand,
more households consume more ecosystem services. On the other hand, more
households have more impacts on the supply of ecosystem services. So far, most
impacts have been negative. As a result, ecosystem services have continued to
degrade. It is important to use ecosystem services more efficiently, turn households
from consumers to producers of ecosystem services, and incorporate household
proliferation into ecosystem service research and management.

Keywords Households Population Ecosystem services Impact Human
activities Landscape Coupled human and natural systems Policy Man-

agement Housing

6.1 Introduction

Ecosystems and landscapes are coupled human and natural systems (Liu et al.
2007 ), in which humans interact with natural components. In the past, human
population sizes and growth rates were usually used by ecologists in studying
relationships between humans and natural systems. However, household numbers