We’re wrapping up our first stakeholder meeting for the Andes/Amazon region. You can now check out all the presentations on the dedicated site for the meeting (sorry - they are currently in spanish, but we’ll try to get some of it into English). We’ve got plenty of feedback specific to our analysis, and over the next weeks we’ll be incorporating it into our situation analysis.
Some of the highlights included pretty active discussion centred on the word poverty, with people from the region preferring the term “calidad de vida”, or “quality of life”. There’s a general disagreement with the validity of poverty definitions when it comes to ecosystem services. Indices like Basic Needs were not favoured for the analysis. This makes my job fairly difficult as, aside from US$1/day, it is the only consistent poverty index we have across the study region with decent spatial resolution. But for other work packages, we can adopt this different definition of poverty and analyse management options and evaluate case studies under the context of quality of life.
I also particularly liked a comment that the ESPA programme should actually be ESPAP - Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation and Prevention. At least for Andes/Amazon, there are less poor people and the overall poverty is significantly less than other ESPA regions, such as in semi-arid sub-saharan Africa. Therefore one important component is maintaining ecosystem services to prevent future poverty in the region.
There really was a lot of important feedback, and shortly we’ll pull together a report and put it on this website.
0 Responses to “The stakeholders speak”