BESSA Building Ecosystem Service Research Capacity in Semi-Arid Africa

Many of the world's poorest people live in marginal and degraded ecosystems and are dependant on what natural resources there are for their food and livelihoods. If poverty is to be reduced, ways must be found to enable these people both to increase the productivity of their provisioning services without further degrading, and ideally restoring, their natural resources, thereby improving their livelihoods with income from the other services.

The existing Pro-Poor Rewards for Environmental Services in Africa (PRESA) participants have identified a lack of sound biophysical evidence on which to base reward mechanisms for provision of ecological services, particularly in light of climate change and uncertain markets for food and other primary commodities.

The objective of this project is to establish a network of researchers and a research agenda focused on developing methodologies and tools to analyse tradeoffs and synergies between different ecosystem services to address poverty alleviation in semi-arid Africa. To achieve these objectives a range of activities have been planned and initiated