Environmental stewardship is the responsible use to protect and enhance natural resources. It involves individual, family and community efforts to preserve and enhance the health of the local natural resources. Local environmental stewardship is achieved through actions and practices such as maintaining or setting up community gardens, removing unwanted species and removing them www.mountaincountryfarm.com/what-is-environmental-stewardship from the public space, monitoring wildlife habitats or participating in watershed clean-up activities. It may also require the community in the planning of the policies and decisions which affect the environment at an individual or at a state level. The scholarly literature on stewardship provides a wealth of information into the variables that affect the results. These include frameworks of sustainable livelihoods CBNRM, adaptive management and concepts of a eco-systems and socio-ecological sustainability.
Generally, stewardship is motivated by the need to attain environmental or social goals (e.g. increasing biodiversity, restoring habitats and ecosystems that have been damaged, preserving the wildlife or fishing catch). The goal-setting process often includes considering the desired benefits, risks, and costs of stewardship actions. Economic motives may include the desire to receive external rewards or avoid sanctions including financial incentives to stewardship activities which reduce environmental impacts market prices for products that are environmentally sustainable and fines for violating regulated resource uses (Wunder 2007).
A broader view of environmental stewardship also includes the concept of civic action, which is a form environmental stewardship. Communities or individuals can take action to improve environmental quality through a series of reflection, practice, and research. This cycle helps them gain concepts, skills and values that allow them to engage in environmental stewardship in their daily life (Stern 2000 offsite link).
