19 April 2012
Dundee researchers to take part in poverty alleviation schemes around the world
University of Dundee researchers are to play a key role in two major international projects seeking to improve the lives of more than one billion people living in poverty around the world.
Andrew Allan, of the University's UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, and Professor Terry Dawson, from the School of the Environment, are members of two international consortia carrying out research projects funded by the £40.5million Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme.
The ESPA aims to deliver an improved understanding of how ecosystem services - the benefits people obtain from the natural environment - can be better managed to reduce poverty.
The work carried out by the consortium partners, both led by the University of Southampton, will provide evidence and tools to enable policy makers around the globe and people living in the poorest areas to manage ecosystems sustainably, and in a way that contributes to poverty reduction. Crucially, the local communities suffering the worst effects of global poverty will be involved in the research process, which will offer solutions that will benefit them directly.
Both studies, which will run for four years, require a multidisciplinary approach with academics from a number of subject areas bringing their expertise to the project.
Professor Dawson will work on the first study, named the ASSETS Project: Attaining Sustainable Services from Ecosystems through Trade-off Scenarios. It will investigate the ecosystem services at the forest-agricultural interface in Amazonia and Africa.
The study will examine the drivers, pressures, and linkages between food security, nutritional health and ecosystems. Specifically, the £2.5m ASSETS study aims to quantify the linkages between the natural ecosystem services that affect - and are affected by- food security and nutritional health for the rural poor at the forest-agricultural interface.
Professor Dawson said, "For many of the poorest communities in developing countries, equitable access to natural environments such as forests is crucial to their food security, health and well-being.
"Our study will be the first to assess in a holistic way how communities derive goods and services from natural landscapes and biodiversity that meets their daily needs over seasonal timescales."
Mr Allan's involvement is in the second project, which will assess the changing ecosystem services deltas provide, mainly focusing on the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Megna Delta in Bangladesh and India. The team aims to understand the relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing and health in deltas.
They will develop methods to predict how deltas around the world may evolve to ensure future policy can maximise the ecosystem services to the benefit of the local population.
The £3.4million study will focus on the Delta, one of the world's most significant deltas and home to some 500 million people. It is characterised by densely populated coastal lowlands with significant poverty, supported to a large extent by natural ecosystems such as the Sunderbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world.
Mr Allan said, "Understanding how poverty alleviation is connected to ecosystem services in an environment as complex and vulnerable as the Sunderbans is critical. Dundee's contribution will examine how the sustainable management of ecosystem services and livelihoods can be improved through better governance."
Notes to editors
- The research in Colombia and Malawi is led by the University of Southampton in collaboration with researchers from the International
Centre for Tropical Agriculture, the Colombian National University, SINCHI and CIPAV( Colombian research organisations), Chancellor
College and WorldFish (Malawi), LEAD Africa, Basque Centre for Climate Change Research (Spain), Conservation International (USA),
Rhodes University (South Africa) and the University of Dundee. More information is available at www.espa-assets.org
- The research in the deltas of Bangladesh is led by the University of Southampton partnered with the universities of Exeter, Dundee
and Oxford as well as The Plymouth Marine Laboratory, NOCS Liverpool and the Hadley Centre. In Bangladesh partnerships are established
with Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET/Lead), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Technological
Assistance for Rural Advancement (TARA), Ashroy Foundation (Rural development), Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), Bangladesh
institute of Development Studies (BIDS), CEGIS & International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). The
project's Indian and Chinese partners are IITR (Roorkee), University of Jadavpur and Aranyak (Rural Development) and East China Normal
University (ECNU), Shanghai.
The Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) research programme is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC),
the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DfID).
www.espa.ac.uk
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