Natural Capital and Local Employment in Argentine Patagonia

Employment is a largely neglected indirect benefit in ecosystem services (ES) assessments, despite its relevance in countries with abundant rural landscapes. We present an analysis of the spatial connections between landscape composition (as a proxy of natural capital and ES) and employment level as measured by the number of people employed in tourism and gastronomy, crop production, animal production, forestry, and fishery production in the Argentinean Patagonia. We assessed landscape composition through land cover analysis within a buffer around the main city of each municipality, and we classified the municipalities in three groups according to their proximity to main national highways at Patagonia (R3, R22, R40): (i) R3 with dominance of rangelands and ocean coasts, (ii) R22 with dominance of rangelands and irrigated crops (mainly apples, pears, grapes, tomatoes, and lucerne), and (iii) R40 with a combination of rangelands, forests, and lakes. Finally, we estimated the portion of employment in each economic subsector attributable to different land covers within each municipality group using generalized additive models and specific employment multiplier coefficients. Our results reveal that land covers explain approximately half of the variation in inter-municipality employment in the different economic subsectors. We found strong differences in employment level among municipality groups, as well as among economic subsectors within groups, which we discussed considering the particular importance of different land cover types, as a measure of natural capital and ES, for employment generation.