The ESPA Programme

Gains in human well-being have come with ecosystem degradation, rising inequalities and increasing environmental vulnerability of the marginalised. To advance our understanding of these complex societal trends, the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme supported a series of studies on the interactions between human use and ecosystem services. The publications in this collection describe in detail the methodologies and resulting datasets from a selection of these studies. It is hoped that these data, and future research in this area, will help develop more open, just and democratic approaches to address the potential trade-offs between human well-being and sustainable ecosystem management.

Organised by Katherine Homewood and Kate Schreckenberg