May 2011 Newsletter

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Contents

1. Editorial
2. ESPA International Programme Advisory Committee (I-PAC)
3. ESPA Project Highlight
4. Making the world a smaller place:  ESPA video conferencing
5. Giving remote communities a voice in ESPA
6. Report from VNN-ESPA Scoping Workshop on Valuation Needs
7. Imperial College London: Research Associate in Ecosystems and Global Environmental Change
8. ESPA Events
9. Other News and Information of Interest to ESPA
10. Useful ESPA Documents
11. ESPA Adverts from Projects

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Editorial

Paul van Gardingen, ESPA Director

Welcome to the 2nd newsletter from the ESPA Directorate.  May has been a busy month for the ESPA programme.  It saw the first meeting of our International Programme Advisory Committee, the first science event hosted by the Directorate (discussing valuation) and a trial of distributed video conferencing to assist in bringing our global community together. 

We were also able to welcome Helen Suich to the Directorate. Helen is working as our Impact Researcher based at the University of Oxford.

Photo: Helen Suich, ESPA Impact Researcher

June also promises to be a busy month for the ESPA programme.  As ESPA’s Director, I will be representing ESPA at a number of research events in the UK and in France. I will report on these in the next newsletter and in our blog.

My team in Edinburgh will be analysing the comments we received from our questionnaire on the ESPA application process, for which we received nearly 200 responses.  Thank you if you contributed.  We will provide an overview of the analysis in the next newsletter.

The Directorate is very interested in learning how the programme can support the ESPA community. To help us understand your needs, we are now preparing a forward-looking questionnaire which will cover themes including emerging science questions and ideas for events and capacity building needs.  This questionnaire is likely to be distributed in July. 

The Directorate is currently preparing a call for small research grants, designed to generate evidence relevant to ESPA to feed into global policy processes during 2012, including the Rio-2012 event, the IPCC 5th Assessment report and the MDG Review process.  Please make sure that you are registered with the Directorate so that you receive notification when the call is released.

We are also currently recruiting for a researcher based at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London.  Any other future opportunities will be publicised through this newsletter and/or our mailing list.

It has been very good to be able to meet with a number of ESPA researchers over the last month.  I am always impressed by the enthusiasm and dedication shown by our research community and this makes me look forward to the series of events being planned for the coming year.  These include events on: defining poverty, understanding impact and of course our annual conference in October.

If you have ideas about these events or would like to suggest additional events, please email them to info [at] espa [dot] ac [dot] uk.  As always, along with my team in the Directorate, we look forward to hearing from any member of the Global ESPA community.

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ESPA International Programme Advisory Committee (I-PAC)

Paul van Gardingen, ESPA Director

The first meeting of the ESPA I-PAC was held in London on 11 May, 2011.  The I-PAC provide advice and guidance to the ESPA funders and Directorate to ensure that the programme delivers against its ambitious objectives of delivering research excellence and development impact.

I was very pleased that all ten members of the committee were able to attend the first meeting.  Three members participated very effectively by video conference, illustrating that it’s not always necessary to travel to be part of important processes.

The I-PAC’s co-Chairs, Dr Atiq Rahman and Professor Kate Brown, guided the discussions through a review of ESPA’s progress to date through to a forward view of what the programme should do next.  The I‑PAC encouraged the programme to actively engage developing country researchers in all our activities, where necessary providing well-targeted capacity building to support researchers.  The Directorate was also encouraged to work with projects to identify the main potential end-users of research and to work with them to build impact.

The ESPA I-PAC members provide a valuable resource to the whole ESPA community and I hope that they will be able to meet many members of the ESPA community at events either in the UK or in ESPA regions.  I have asked them all to provide thoughts on ESPA as blog entries and I hope that these will be interesting to you over the coming months.

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ESPA Project Highlight

Duncan Macqueen, ESPA Partnership and Project Development Grant

This month, our featured project is an ESPA Partnership and Project Development Grant ‘Biomass energy - optimising its contribution to poverty reduction and ecosystem services’, led by Duncan Macqueen.

The project designed a South-South-North consortium (TERI-India, Practical Action-Kenya, Centre for Development Management-Malawi and multiple partners in the UK). The design explores how to improve the impacts of an expected trebling in renewable biomass energy by 2050 for poor people and the ecosystem services in regions where biomass is produced.

The project mapped out what a desirable transition toward optimising biomass energy impacts might look like (http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/13556IIED.pdf) with four other background papers (http://www.iied.org/natural-resources/key-issues/forestry/biomass-energy-optimising-its-contribution-poverty-reduction-a) - in anticipation of a larger project that would map out and help optimise poverty and ecosystem service impacts in practice.

A proposed future ESPA Research Consortium project will allow the team to conduct a full economic, social and environmental sciences evaluation of how to (i) deliver more efficient / less emitting conversion and use of biomass energy; (ii) determine the values placed on biomass-related ecosystem services and aspects of poverty by different actors, and the implications for biomass production policy reform (iii) develop pilot of pro-poor, ecosystem friendly formalization of biomass energy value chains in India, Kenya and Malawi and (iv) work with high level decision makers to develop integrated biomass energy policies in India, Kenya and Malawi to promote the above with high potential for replication around the world.

Funding of the proposed project is subject to a competitive peer review process and decision by the ESPA Programme Executive Board.

Please visit the project update page on our website for more details from Duncan Macqueen.

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Making the world a smaller place:  ESPA video conferencing

Paul van Gardingen, ESPA Director

Our Global Forum will support the ESPA community to work together to create new knowledge and evidence and to make sure that this evidence is used to build impact.  People and partnerships are at the heart of this process. The Directorate has made a commitment to assist projects to interact in new and innovative ways that enhance the research process while at the same time avoiding the unnecessary expense and time required to travel.  Needless to say, this also reduces the programme’s environmental footprint, something that is very important for a world-leading environmental project such as ESPA.

Many of you will have already experienced our use of video conferencing to support our events and make the world a smaller place for our community.  Most of our events will be organised with the option of joining electronically and the public ones will normally be webcast and recorded.  Our valuation event was delivered in this way and the recording will be published on our website early in June.  The advantage of this approach was unexpectedly demonstrated when participants from Scotland were prevented from travelling because of the combination of storms and volcanic ash.  In spite of this, one of our researchers was still able to contribute electronically on the day.

We realise that very few researchers have direct access to the conventional technology that is required for full video conferencing.  We feel that it is important to remove this barrier to participation, especially for our partners in developing countries.  Lack of access to technology and the opportunities it creates is yet another dimension of poverty, one that ESPA is now actively working to address.

Over the last month, the Directorate has been working with the technology provider Cisco to evaluate their Movi telepresence system providing reliable, full-functioned video conferencing capability to desktop machines (Windows and Mac).  We have provided clients to partners in the programme in many parts of the world and there has been universal positive feedback.  As a result, we now plan to launch an operational system for the programme by September.  All ESPA projects will have access to this system which is fully integrated with the UK academic community’s video conferencing service, JVCS.  This is how we provide video services for all our events, and by the end of the year, this will be available to all ESPA projects.  The ESPA team in Edinburgh will be able to provide some support for projects learning to use these tools, especially for the organisation of virtual workshops and global meetings.

It is crucial that our partners from developing countries are not disadvantaged by lack of access to facilities and technology.  For this reason, Cisco will provide additional registrations and call provision that are specifically available for use by ESPA researchers and their partners in developing countries.  This contribution has been warmly welcomed by the Directorate and significantly enhances our ability to support researchers outside the UK.  Further information about the roll out of the ESPA video conferencing service will be provided as part of the Global Forum in future newsletters.  A case study of its application is included below.

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Giving remote communities a voice in ESPA

Paul van Gardingen, ESPA Director

The ESPA programme is a research programme all about people.  If you look at the ESPA Research Framework, you can see that people are at the heart of ESPA’s research, and that ESPA research needs to deliver benefits to people and their communities. 

Whenever I get a chance to meet communities linked to ESPA research, I’m eager to talk with them.  This, unfortunately for me, is not easy with a global programme of the size and complexity of ESPA.  For this reason, I was delighted when Carolyn Stephens, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and Visiting Professor in the National University of Tucumán, and one of our PIs from the recently completed Partnership and Project Development Grants, set me a challenge.  This was to meet with young people from a remote secondary school in Colalao del Valle in Tucumán, Argentina during one of the trials of our video conferencing system.  There was just one small problem. No internet access in their school in a remote mountain valley!  That’s the type of problem I just can’t resist!

We decided to try to link with the school, Escuela Secundaria Nuestra Señora del Rosario, using video conferencing over a satellite modem.

The school, and its young people, were really excited about the meeting.  They had prepared statements about why the environment and ecosystems are so important to them, and how much they valued the opportunity to have their voices heard by me, and, by extension, by the wider ESPA community.

Photo: A local NGO FUNDEFMA, prepared maps for the pupils to show where they were

Our first attempt to connect was unfortunately not successful. The satellite modem did not connect to the computer at our arranged location. This was not through want of trying, with support from LSHTM and AST Satellite communication technicians.  The group was not deterred and jumped into an ESRC-provided 4WD to go along the valley to one of the few houses that does have an internet connection. There, thanks to schoolteacher Fátima Lizarraga de Dorao, we finally got a connection. Albeit a very poor one!

Photo: getting to an internet connection – helped by a 4WD from Carolyn’s ESRC Mid-Senior Career Fellowship

Once we were connected, the young people told me about themselves, their hopes for the future and just how important the environment is to them. Through this, they reinforced just how important ESPA’s research is to real people, something that is often so easy to forget.

Photo: The young people (Santiago Sazo, Manuel Mamaní, Maximiliano Moya, Gloria Aráoz, Santiago Armella, Eric Corregidor, Belén Moya, Rocío Arnedo, Lourdes Tena, Leonardo González) present their views with Carolyn and the School´s Director Hector Lagoria

The conversation was originally planned to last for 15 minutes and ended up lasting over 2 hours.  During that time, I was presented with a number of challenges of such significance that I repeated them to researchers attending our valuation workshop. I presented these as the themes that ESPA research needs to address.  I was told that one of the most pressing challenges is that people from outside of the community come in and exploit the environment, often resulting in local people becoming poorer.  I was then told that local people often do not have ways of gaining the full range of benefits (or values) from the ecosystems around them. Finally, I was told that the young people were concerned about the sustainability of their lives.

Photo: Manuel Mamaní walks hours every day to get to school from his remote village in Las Cañas, Tucumán

My virtual meeting with this group of very passionate young people on the other side of the world, served to highlight to me the importance of ESPA projects being inclusive and making the effort to engage with the people who need ESPA research.  I was asked to, and agreed to, meet the group again and to help them meet with young people from other regions to discuss why the environment and ecosystems matter to them.  This is something the Directorate will do in the coming year, especially as the programme prepares for the Rio+2012 event.

I was struck by the enthusiasm and commitment of the young people that I met with at this virtual meeting as well as by their understanding of the issues important to ESPA.  I understand that the group was so excited after the meeting that they kept talking for days after the call ended and they went home from school.  When one considers that at least one of the students has a nearly five-hour journey (four on foot) to get to and from school, one still feels humbled.

Where did this leave us with the experiment in remote communities?  At the time slightly frustrated, slightly embarrassed and, of course, determined to succeed.  A few days later we tried again, at another remote location up a river valley in the UNT´s beautiful Parque Biológico Sierras de San Javier, this time with no access to power or conventional communication.  There, with support from Luis Imbert, a UNT park guard, and encouragement of her dogs, Carolyn connected almost instantly and we had a high quality video call from her laptop.

Photo: Carolyn, and Sera, set up the satellite modem (Luis takes photos)

For me, this experience illustrates a really important point for the ESPA programme.  As I mentioned at the start of this article, people need to be at the heart of everything we do as a programme.  It may seem difficult to do so at times and far-removed from our academic careers, but I was left with the important impression that my two hours of talking with young people in a remote community was one of the most productive discussions identifying key areas for ESPA I have had in recent weeks.

It is crucial that ESPA’s researchers make the effort to interact with local communities and stakeholders in the places that they are working.  When the major ESPA Consortium Projects commence operation at the end of this year, the Directorate will be working with them to ensure that poor and marginalised communities around the world do have a voice in what ESPA does.

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Report from VNN-ESPA Scoping Workshop on Valuation Needs

Georgina Mace, ESPA Associate Director for Knowledge

This workshop was held at Imperial College London on May 24th 2011. This was a joint event, contributing to the scoping phase of NERC’s Valuing Nature Network (VNN). The workshop brought together a range of current ESPA researchers to discuss the role of valuation in ecosystem services as they affect the wellbeing of poor people.

There were 30 people in attendance. The workshop was streamed live over the internet. We were joined by video conference links to colleagues in Scotland and the USA.
The discussions were led by Georgina Mace, ESPA Associate Director for Knowledge. Georgina was joined by ESPA Director, Paul van Gardingen.

Paul introduced the day by emphasising three challenges for participants:

• To determine the real value of ecosystem services for local communities
• To consider how we can capture sustainable benefits from ecosystem services
• To consider how to protect ecosystem services for future generations

On the day, attendees heard short presentations from three participants:

Genevieve Patenaude: ESPA Project Framework Grant (http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/espaframework/framework.html)

Eva Zabey (WBCSD): introducing WBCSD Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation (2011) (http://www.wbcsd.org)

Bob Costanza: Bob emphasised on the need to define ‘poverty’ and to incorporate the interaction of the four types of capital, viz., natural capital, human capital, social capital and physical capital in our work (http://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/iss)

During the workshop participants reviewed the conceptual framework being used across the scoping phase of the VNN and then broke into three discussion groups. The groups each discussed the same topics. First they considered some real situations for ESPA; places where poor people’s livelihoods and wellbeing are affected by ecosystem services. The groups reviewed the goods and services on which people there depend, and considered what kinds of valuation might be necessary in each case including market, non-market, monetary, non-monetary, aesthetic and cultural values. Reviewing the case studies a second phase of working groups then considered the drivers of change and analysis needs. Building on all this work the groups then identified gaps in knowledge and priority research questions.

A set of priority research areas were agreed at the end of the day.

• Valuation of what for whom? Who decides what to value and how? This question concerns the conflicts and synergies between different actors (poor people, local people, government, commerce, business). How to avoid conflicts between those making and those being affected by decisions concerning ecosystems, their goods and services?
• The whole systems here are very complex; involving linked social, environmental topics, issues of scale and resilience, non-linearities, feedbacks and changing dynamics. How to approach unravelling the science in such complex systems? Look at whole system complexity science in other contexts for some approaches.
• Measures and monitoring. What is wellbeing? What is poverty? What are the benefits and costs of good and bad ecosystem services management and how can local actors and decision-makers best monitor them?
• Understanding the importance of history and context. Institutional frameworks are important but are they generalisable, at all? Considerations of land tenure arrangements for different beneficiaries and different ecosystem services.
• Understand the different drivers and incentives across actors and scales, especially given demographic change, migration, urbanization, economic growth, environmental change and risks.

Next steps:

• The full workshop report will soon be available on the ESPA website
• The priority research topics will feed into the design of the Valuing Nature Network research programme. The next step here is a town-meeting that will be held in London on June 24th 2011. Visit the VNN site (www.valuing-nature.net) for details

The priority topics will feed into future events being planned by the ESPA Directorate.

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Imperial College London: Research Associate in Ecosystems and Global Environmental Change

Closing date: 20 June 2011

Vacancy reference number: NS2011072NT

The Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) Directorate and Grantham Institute for Climate Change are seeking to appoint a suitably qualified Research Associate to be based at Imperial College London.

Working closely with ESPA’s Associate Director of Knowledge and the Institute’s Policy Director, the post-holder will help develop the vision and methodology to deliver and communicate creative and high impact research. You will analyse and assess current ecosystems and global change research, identifying knowledge gaps and synthesising information to inform research programme development. 

For the full advert, job description and details of how to apply, please visit: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/employment

(Select ‘Job Search’ and then enter the job title or vacancy reference number into ‘Keywords’). Please complete and upload an application form as directed.

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ESPA Events

As part of the ESPA Global Forum, we will host a number of events throughout the lifetime of the programme. These will be used to address specific research questions, to build the community, and to strengthen the capacity of researchers around the world. Please register with the ESPA Global Forum in order to be alerted when new events are scheduled.

Please make a note of the 2011 ESPA Annual Conference:

ESPA Annual Conference: 25th–28th October 2011, London, UK

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Other News and Information of Interest to ESPA

• Counting on the Environment: The contribution of forests to rural livelihoods

15 June 2011; The Royal Society, London, United Kingdom

ESPA Director, Paul van Gardingen, will be speaking at this event

The role that environmental income plays in poverty alleviation remains poorly documented and not obvious to most policy-makers. The existing tools for assessing poverty and income fall short of capturing the importance of environmental income, so that its true value in the livelihoods of the world’s rural poor remains largely invisible (‘the hidden harvest’). The aim of this conference is to put the environment more firmly onto the poverty agenda, and to strengthen the case for more systematic data collection on the dependence of poor people on natural resources.

At the core of the conference will be the presentation of results from CIFOR's six year Poverty and Environment Network project (PEN), which is arguably the largest and most comprehensive global analysis of tropical forests and poverty (>8,000 households in 40 study sites from 25 developing countries). The scope of the conference is however, much broader than PEN. Other presentations will be given by the IUCN, IFRI and the World Bank, and the day will finish with an interactive panel discussion with experts in the field, making the conference a global forum on the role of environmental income and forests in rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation.

Please join us for what promises to be a landmark event for forests and poverty research.

For more information and to register, please visit the conference website at http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/london-conference or contact the conference organisers at cifor-pen [at] cgiar [dot] org  

• British Soil Science Society Annual Conference 2011: Soils and Ecosystem Services: the challenges for science, management and policy

19th and 20th July 2011; Royal Geographical Society, London

See the full programme outline online

This is the first annual meeting of the British Soil Science Society since our reorganisation. 2011 is also the 20th Anniversary of the Institute of Professional Soil Scientists. To celebrate, we have organised an event that we hope has broad appeal to scientists and practitioners alike. The issue of ‘ecosystem services’ has become a hot-topic. There is a global trend towards recognising the monetary and non-monetary value of natural resources to human health and well-being and in using this information in planning and decision-making. The UK Government and devolved administrations are investigating ‘ecosystem services’ as a mechanism to improve the use of natural resources to meet major and inter-related challenges in food security, reducing poverty, providing a healthy environment to live in, halting biodiversity losses, etc. Both valuation and effective management are reliant upon up-to-date, adequate and accessible scientific information.

This two day event has been organised as a forum to review, discuss and learn from our own scientific and practical experiences in trying to develop, improve and deliver information on the capacity of soils to maintain a supply of diverse goods and services in a changing world.

Invited speakers will present diverse perspectives on soils/ecosystem-services related research initiatives, including the UK National Ecosystem, TEEB, Defra and RCUK. We have organised the sessions to provide an opportunity for discussion and debate amongst the Society's members.

• How to get the best out of research collaboration; an article from a recent Science & Development Network Update

An OECD report outlines good practice for effective international research collaboration — but success can never be guaranteed.

One of the most promising aspects of the development scene in recent years has been the growing willingness of researchers, spurred by agencies such as the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, to collaborate across international boundaries to develop potential solutions to important scientific and social problems.

See the full article on the Science and Development Network website.

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Useful ESPA Documents

Many useful ESPA related documents are held on the ESPA website.

Of particular interest to current ESPA researchers are the ESPA Knowledge Strategy & Research Framework and the Impact Framework documents.

The ESPA Knowledge Strategy & Research Framework document is intended to provide a starting point to conceptualise ESPA’s research. It builds upon the figure presented in the 2010 Announcement of Opportunity, which was modified following feedback from the ESPA research community during early workshops in support of the call.

The ESPA Impact Framework offers our researchers advice on how to design their ‘Pathway to Impact’, to ensure that their research delivers real pro-poor benefits. It describes how to conceptualise useful impact, how to create that impact and how to communicate work to different audiences.

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ESPA Adverts from Projects

This section of our Newsletter will be devoted to adverts and requests from ESPA projects (e.g. adverts from projects requesting data or information on a particular topic or a simple request for some specific help/advice from the ESPA global community).

If you would like to post an advert or a request please let the ESPA Directorate Administrator, admin [at] espa [dot] ac [dot] uk (Ruth Swanney), know and it will feature in a future Newsletter.