This report presents the results of a situation analysis of ecosystem services and poverty in the Amazon and Eastern Andes, carried out between September 2007 and March 2008. It intends to provide guidance to the Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation Programme (ESPA) programme as regards the definition of research and capacity-building priorities for the Andes/Amazon. As such, the report takes a macro-scale approach to examine the state of knowledge on ecosystem services, well-being and related management needs in the region. To reduce the inherent caveats of such an approach, the situation analysis was embedded in a stakeholder consultation process, in which relevant stakeholders contributed to improving and validating its outcomes.
Key conclusion points include:
- resource and ecosystem services (ES) abundance do not necessarily mean that the poor are less vulnerable to changes in ES provision;
- the distinction between the Andes/Amazon and the other ESPA study areas is the relatively strong level of social organisation and grassroots participation in policy processes, including environmental policy;
- large-scale commercial interests are controlling increasing shares of the region’s resources. As a result, large quantities of globally valued ES are lost and traditional populations and poor rural colonists face ever more limited resource access to local ES;
- many rural poor have adapted their livelihood strategies to abundant ES and may, therefore, be more vulnerable to abrupt changes in ES provision - a scenario that this report shows is realistic, and therefore threatens the survival and socio-cultural reproduction of indigenous cultures.
The authors recommend three core areas to be included in the ESPA Program agenda for the Andes/Amazon. The first area involves primarily biophysical, the second interdisciplinary, and the third primarily socio-economic and policy research:
- understand and predict spatial and temporal dynamics of key locally and globally valued ES by identifying critical thresholds of change in the provision of ES due to human impacts and their interaction; and developing and disseminating practical methods to monitor and document local changes in ES provision;
- understand, measure and value the contribution of locally important ES to generate well-being among heterogeneous local stakeholder groups;
- promote innovative approaches to reduce the transaction costs and strengthen the implementation of incentive based management options for enhanced ES provision and conduct comparative research to extract lessons learned.
