Assessing health, livelihoods, ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in populous deltas

Delta regions are probably the most vulnerable type of coastal environment and their ecosystem services face multiple stresses in the coming decades. These stresses include, amongst others, local drivers due to land subsidence, population growth and urbanisation within the deltas, regional drivers due to changes in catchment management (e.g. upstream land use and dam construction), and global climate change impacts such as sea-level rise.The ecosystem services of river deltas support high population densities, estimated at over 500 million people globally, with particular concentrations in Southern and Eastern Asia and Africa. A large proportion of these people experience extremes of poverty and are severely exposed to vulnerability from environmental and ecological stress and degradation. In areas close to or below the poverty boundary, both subsistence and cash elements of the economy tend to rely disproportionately heavily on ecosystem services which underpin livelihoods.Understanding how to sustainably manage the ecosystem services in delta regions and thus improve health and reduce poverty and vulnerability requires consideration of all these stresses and their complex interaction. This proposal aims to develop methods to understand and characterise the key drivers of change in ecosystem services that affect the environment and economic status in the world's populous deltas. This will be done through analysis of the evolving role of ecosystem services, exploring the implications of changes for the livelihoods of delta residents, and developing management and policy options that will be beneficial now and in the future in the face of the large uncertainties of the next few decades and beyond.The extensive coastal fringe of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta within Bangladesh has been selected as the pilot study area for this work. This is because Bangladesh is almost entirely located on one of the world's largest and most dynamic deltas. It is characterised by densely populated coastal lowlands with significant poverty, supported to a large extent by natural ecosystems such as the Sunderbahns (the largest mangrove forest in the world). It is under severe development pressure due to many growing cities, eg Khulna and the capital, Dhaka.At present the importance of ecosystems services to poverty and livelihoods is poorly understood. This is due to due to the complexity of interactions between physical drivers, environmental pressures and the human responses to stresses and the resultant impacts on ecosystems. Government policy rarely takes up the ecosystems services perspective and as a result an holistic overview of their value is often overlooked.This project aims to address this gap by providing policy makers with the knowledge and tools to enable them to evaluate the effects of policy decisions on people's livelihoods. This will be done by creating a holistic approach to formally evaluating ecosystems services and poverty in the context of changes such as subsidence and sea level rise, land degradation and population pressure in delta regions. This will be tested and applied in coastal Bangladesh and tested conceptually in other populous deltas.

The research will benefit a number of stakeholders, both within the timeframe and location of the project, and thereafter and elsewhere as explained below.Rural communities in the study will gain within the timeframe of the study and beyond though developing knowledge about the way the local environment and their interactions with it function. More simply, through a process of stakeholder engagement which will include representation of community they will be given information about which ecological services are currently sustainable and which are not in a spatio-temporal context. Within a series of smaller workshops in the conceptual development of WP2 and through the main 6 monthly workshops community representation will take part in discussions about how their traditional management techniques can be complemented by the new knowledge in order that the local landscape can be managed in a more sustainable way. Through these discussions we can take onboard the community's indigenous methods, diverse utilisation of the ecosystems matrix and the new knowledge on ecological services to produce alternative 'negotiated' futures. Local rural agricultural and socio-economic development agencies will benefit from knowledge that will aid strategic decision-making for agriculture, service provision from a range of ecologies and the alleviation of poverty. Hypothetically, and supported by the consortiums investigations in-country, we may show that it is the dynamic range of access to a variety of services from a number of ecologies in a temporally distributed context that is highly significant and that inclusion of local indigenous knowledge is fundamental to sustainable decision making processes. As with the accepted wisdom of livelihood diversification so it may be with access and utilisation of ecological services, with adaptation and thus resilience being underpinned by the ecological matrix. Ecological and socio-environmental modelling outputs and associated scenarios will feed into the strategies and policy formulation options at a local level through broad governance wide distribution of findings from the project providing a context for adaptation and impact assessment. The impacts of the research will also provide a unifying context for the interaction of local development agencies and decision making bodies to interact with the strategic organisations in a more regional context. Regional/National agencies: At the national level in Bangladesh, Ministries like Environment will benefit from the insight provided this study of present and future conditions in Bangladesh. They will learn about the social and biophysical boundary conditions that affect coastal Bangladesh and how these have changed and will continue to change. The study will develop methods and results that can support long-term analysis and policy development. It is important to understand that the project is not merely concerned with identifying future trends and potential problems, but will explicitly evaluate the policy choices that are available. For example, the surveys will allow us to understand the current role of ecosystem services in alleviating poverty, while the modelling will allow us to understand possible trends in those services and their effects on local poverty and health. We will ensure that national Bangladeshi stakeholders have ample opportunity to take advantage of the research with contact at all of the six-monthly Workshops to which they will all be invited. We will also reach regional/national agencies in China via holding two (out of 9) Workshops in Kolkata and Shanghai, respectively, where regional and national representatives will be invited. The funds for travel to Asian Workshops for these meetings by the PI/co-Is, and the time spent by the PI (??% time), ?? co-Is (??-??% time) and PDRFs (??% time) amounts to £??, equivalent to ??% of the total budget.