Building capacity for ecosystem services to reduce poverty
Over the last month the ESPA programme has been very pleased to welcome eight very talented researchers who have been awarded ESPA Fellowships. Over the next three years, our ESPA Fellows will be working with projects in Africa and South Asia to enhance their own capacity to undertake ESPA research, whilst also supporting the uptake of research to ensure that poor people benefit from the sustainable management and use of ecosystem services. Over the coming months each of the new Fellows will be providing blogs about their work on the ESPA website.
This year’s ESPA Annual Meeting continues the theme of making ESPA’s science more accessible to groups who wish to put ESPA knowledge to use to benefit the poor. For the first time, this meeting will be held outside the UK, with the conference being held in New Delhi India, on 26-27 November. Registration is now open and I hope to see a mix of ESPA researchers, researchers from outside ESPA and most importantly potential users of ESPA research. The meeting has a series of thematic sessions, linked to the key areas of demand for ESPA research in South Asia, supporting food security, water security and adapting to climate change. There will also be discussion about the ways that ESPA research can affect change focusing on markets and policy incentives (including payments for ecosystem services), and ways and examples of linking science with policy and practice. The draft meeting agenda is available here.
We have recently published videos from a trip that I made to Kenya earlier this year near Mombasa where I met researchers and local communities involved in two linked projects, Swahili Seas and CESEA - Coastal Ecosystem Services in East Africa. My visit was hosted by the Kenyan Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, who have provided local leadership for the research in Kenya. I was able to go into the field with KMFRI researchers who showed me their work to measure soil carbon under both Mangrove and Sea grass communities . This is one of the first studies anywhere in the world undertaking this type of integrated research and I was really impressed by the skill and experience being provided by researchers from KMFRI, who in turn had benefited from capacity strengthening as part of the ESPA programme. I was then able to see how local communities were directly benefitting from the research when I visited the Makongeni primary school when they received a set of text books that had been purchased using the first payment for carbon that was a direct result of ESPA research under the Swahili Seas project. I was really impressed to hear the school’s Head Teacher explain why the environment was so important to the community and the school’s young students and the difference that the ESPA project had made.