The poverty and ecosystem services mapping project aims to overcome three major barriers to sustaining ecosystem services and creating economic opportunities for poverty reduction:
- Lack of relevant information on the connection between ecosystem services and human well-being;
- Narrow focus of institutions on their mandates making it difficult to work across sectors and professional, geographic, and political boundaries;
- Limited use of poverty-ecosystem services information in policy formulation and development debates.
The project builds on established partnerships in East Africa that seek to influence the implementation of poverty reduction strategies and change environmental reporting by developing geospatial indicators of ecosystem services and poverty. Over the past years, we have:
- Brought together national and international institutions working on poverty, agriculture, biodiversity, water, and other ecosystem services. These include key stakeholders on environmental reporting and implementation of poverty reduction strategies.
- Compiled, shared, and made use of new remote sensing and poverty data in addition to GIS experiences and data holdings built over the past decade by these institutions.
These partnerships already have affected how poverty is being perceived and analyzed in Kenya and Uganda.
Kenya’s first atlas of ecosystem services and poverty was released in 2007, using spatial indicators to show the levels and locations of poverty and selected ecosystem services. In the upcoming year we will complete a set of policy briefs examining the spatial relationship between poverty and selected ecosystem goods and services in Uganda. We will then concentrate our efforts on integrating these ecosystem services and poverty maps and their analyses into development decisions in both countries and share the experience and results with other African countries.
To sustain ecosystem services and create economic opportunities for poverty reduction through better management of ecosystems, we will employ a five step strategy. The final selection of activities aimed at boosting the use of the maps and data will depend on resources available and most importantly on more specific ideas and requirements coming from country partners.
- Complete and release Uganda report
- Disseminate new poverty and ecosystem service maps to targeted groups and expand the user network in Kenya and Uganda
- Work with government and civil society in Kenya and Uganda to increase the likelihood that development decisions will incorporate information from the new poverty and ecosystem services maps. With country partners, WRI will engage key stakeholders in government and civil society to adapt the maps into a specific policy or decision-making context.
- Evaluate the usefulness of the new maps within Kenya and Uganda and identify actions to support their long-term production and use
- Share Kenya and Uganda experiences and initiate similar mapping activities in Africa
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