Community-based valuation of wetland ecosystem services: insights from Bamenda, Cameroon

Abstract Wetlands provide important benefits in terms of provisioning, cultural, regulating and supporting ecosystem services to societies all over the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the existence of multiple approaches for the valuation of these services, economic methods have dominated the scientific debate with infrequent integration of non-monetary valuation methods to capture community perceptions. This paper aims to assess the value of ecosystem services provided by wetlands based on the perception of the local community in Bamenda Cameroon. We explore if this perception is influenced by factors such as gender, education, and sub-division of residence in relation to the wetland area using a questionnaire administered purposively to a total of 400 respondents living/carrying out activities in and around wetlands. We complemented this methodology with field observation to explore aspects of wetland utilisation on the ground beyond the pre-defined survey questions assessing communities’ perception of the importance of different ecosystem services. Data was entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 20) for wrangling and visualisation in R (version 4.3.0). The results indicate that the most valued wetland ecosystem services are directly linked to peoples’ livelihood such as the provision of food, traditional agricultural practices and the support of habitats to various plants and animals collected or hunted by local people. We also found a significant difference between the perception of the importance of ecosystem services based on educational level and sub-division of location in relation to wetlands (P-value ≤ 0.01), suggesting that communities living closer to the wetlands appreciate the importance of the ecosystem services relatively more than those living further away. Our results are relevant for improved recognition and integration of local community interest and engagement for inclusive wetland conservation and management.