CESEA - Coastal Ecosystem Services in East Africa

The CESEA project is a collaboration between scientists and researchers in Tanzania, Kenya and the UK. By bringing together experts in ecololgy and development it will find new ways to help local people maintain their coastal resources whilst beating poverty. In particular, it will work with people dependent on resources from mangroves and seagrasses, two ecosystems that are vitally important for fish, coastal protection and the capture and storage of carbon but which are suffering high rates of destruction.

The project team will help with the local and national management of these ecosystems in three ways:

First we will work with the forestry departments in Kenya and Zanzibar to identify how they can better support community efforts at conservation and management. Laws already exist that allow community control of coastal resources; on paper these should mean local people benefiting from their resources whilst conserving them. But achieving this needs the help and support of the relevant government institutions and this often fails to happen on the ground. CESEA research will identify what the barriers are to this and how it can happen more effectively, and open up new channels of communication between the local communities and the government bodies.

Second we will research how to include seagrass meadows into payments for ecosystem services projects. Seagrasses are ecologically linked with mangrove forests - both act as nursery grounds for fish, as protection for coastlines, as sites for the filtering and removal of pollution and as sinks for carbon. We know how to measure the carbon in mangroves and how to use this carbon storage for the benefit of local people, through selling 'carbon credits' for well managed forests. This has never been achieved for seagrasses, despite their strong links with the mangrove ecosystems. For the first time we will develop the scientific methods necessary to measure the amounts and sources of carbon in these systems in such a way that community organisations could follow our methods. We will recommend ways in which the results of this science could be used in combination with mangrove systems to sell carbon to international markets.

Third we will explore why some communities in East Africa already have a good record of managing their mangroves and seagrasses whilst others have degraded ecosystems. We will let the successful local communities share their knowledge with other communities in the region and help produce guidelines for how this can be done. We will organise meetings between local community leaders and the government officers and executives with responsibility for helping community management of mangroves and seagrass resources. These will be a powerful way of ensuring that the voices of communities are heard and that national plans can be informed by their experiences.

The CESEA project aims to be of direct benefit to people in coastal communities in East Africa, to governments and to national and international NGOs and organisations. In particular the project will benefit:

1. Coastal communities in Kenya and Zanzibar
2. Kenya Forest Service and Department of Forestry and Non-Renewable Resources Zanzibar
3. National Environmental Management Authority and Ministry of Fisheries, Kenya, and Department of Environment and Ministry of Livestock Development and Fisheries Zanzibar
4. NGOs and donor funded projects working with coastal communities in Kenya and Zanzibar
5. International NGOs and organizations, e.g. IUCN and UNEP
6. UNFCCC

The impacts at the local community level will come from structured communication between communities and community leaders, between community leaders and national government organisations and from facilitating access by communities to options for payments for ecosystem services (PES). The communication will involve arranging a series of workshops at which communities with a range of approaches to managing their local mangrove and seagrass resources will learn from each other and exchange best practice; the project will draw from these meetings to produce material for local community guidance, disseminated through the East African Forum for Payments for Ecosystem Services (EAFPES). Additional workshops will bring together communities and representatives of the forest services to explore barriers to effective communication and community support. Finally the project will help to select those communities that do not at present benefit from payments for ecosystem services schemes but which have the natural resource base and governance structures that make them most likely to succeed with such schemes. It will muster the support of EAFPES and the relevant government departments in developing new schemes in these areas.

The forest services in Kenya and Zanzibar are mandated with supporting community based conservation and management initiatives but often struggle to do so. By working closely with them both this project will identify key barriers to effective implementation of current legislation and ways of overcoming these. Workshops will bring together researchers, forestry officers and executives and local community leaders to develop policy guideline documents aimed at audiences within the relevant institutions; hence the impact is designed to be highly contextualised and directly relevant to Kenya and Zanzibar, whilst still drawing on lessons from outside these countries. The relevant government ministries and departments will benefit by sharing this detailed research with senior management. The research findings will also directly inform relevant national plans, including REDD readiness and Mangrove Management plans; the team includes national experts who are part of the panels developing these plans.

By looking at the scientific, practical and regulatory potential for the inclusion of seagrass ecosystems into joint mangrove/seagrass PES schemes the project will be of benefit to numerous national and international NGOs interested in using PES to combine conservation with livelihood support. Project results will be listed on the Blue Carbon portal and the protocols and approaches developed or suggested will be made available for other projects to follow. Since this project will be the first to look at the feasibility of seagrass for PES its results will be of great interest to international efforts to conserve 'blue carbon' and will inform international policy on this (we have team members represented on the 'blue carbon' working group and dealing with wetlands for IPCC).