The Socio-Economics of the West, Central and Southern African Coastal Communities

3.5 Biodiversity and Cultural Services fromWest and Central African coastal Ecosystems

The GCLME and CCLME coastal ecosystems, including mangroves, shallow lagoons and seagrass beds and meadows, are biodiversity hotspots, hosting an array of life forms and activity that benefit people. 183 Social interactions and leisure activities, as well as spiritual and religious customs, are rooted in coastal people’s connection to the ocean. 184 Taken together, such biodiversity and cultural services from west and central African coastal ecosystems provide at least US$ 55 million to the GCLME and CCLME regions. 185 GCLME coastal biodiversity and cultural services (excluding tourism) provide an estimated impact of US$ 37.6 million, a fraction of the total estimated US$ 27.2 billion impact (excludes tourism) 186 attributed to GCLME coastal ecosystem services. 187 For the CCLME, an estimated US$ 17.5 million biodiversity/cultural value from mangrove and seagrass ecosystems is an even smaller portion of the CCLME coastal ecosystem economic impact figure of US$ 1.5 billion (excludes “opportunities for tourism”). 188

Identical to the methodology used to calculate the economic impact associated with ocean biodiversity and cultural services, the estimated economic impacts of their GCLME coastal counterparts is based on figures from the COPI report (see section 2.4). Interwies (2011) equally assigns a derived value of US$ 10.3/ha to the economic impact of both biodiversity and cultural services from coastal ecosystems. 189 The median value of US$ 23/ha from the Brander meta-analysis (2006) used to calculate CCLME biodiversity/cultural ocean ecosystem services is also applied to CCLME mangroves, seagrass beds and meadows, and beaches and dunes (although the beaches and dunes value is omitted from the total due to lack of data on the size of these ecosystems) (see section 2.4). 190 The US$ 23/ha value is multiplied by the area of CCLME mangrove coverage and also by the area of CCLME seagrass coverage to obtain separate biodiversity/cultural values of US$ 15.2million for mangroves andUS$2.3million for seagrass beds andmeadows. 191

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