Objective of the Workshop organized by BC3:

The ESPA programme (2009-2018) is a £43.9 million investment funded by the UK Government through a partnership involving the Department for International Development (DFID), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). ESPA was designed and framed as a global interdisciplinary research programme, aimed at generating and providing evidence to support decision-makers and natural resource users to address the challenges of sustainable ecosystem management and poverty reduction.  ESPA has made efforts to conceptualize the linkages between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation, thus looking closely at different dimensions of human well-being in the global South. ESPA has led to a significant body of high-quality interdisciplinary research on ecosystem services and human wellbeing. A significant contributions of ESPA has been in advancing conceptual frameworks for addressing ecosystem services and wellbeing linkages, specifically by employing a multi-dimensional understanding of human wellbeing.

IPBES is conducting various large scale assessments, with four regional assessments and one thematic assessment on land degradation being presented at the next IPBES plenary in Medellin, Colombia, in March 2018. The global assessment is ongoing and will be presented in 2019. Besides capacity building and the work on assessments, one important part of the work in IPBES is to use indigenous knowledge. The work of IPBES is based on its conceptual framework (CF). It is expected that an assessment on values and valuation might be launched in 2018 subject to approval by the Plenary in March 2018. As part of the disentangling of the IPBES CF, IPBES has looked closely at the notion of NCP. The IPBES Multidisciplinary Expert Panel has suggested opening up the GQL box of the conceptual framework as well as the linkages that exist between GQL, NCP and governance systems.

The objective of the workshop is to bring together experts from ESPA programme (Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation) and IPBES (the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) to: 1) transfer knowledge from ESPA to IPBES regarding ways to analyse human wellbeing in the context of the ES framework; 2) discuss how such knowledge can be best put into use in IPBES assessments given the IPBES conceptual framework, e.g., focusing on the links between “nature’s contributions to people” (NCP) and a good quality of life (GQL); 3) identify knowledge gaps, opportunities and challenges in the analysis and assessment of NCP-GQL.

Workshop Organizers: Unai Pascual (BC3), Kate Schrekenberg (ESPA)

Participants