CNH-S: Poverty Traps and Mangrove Ecosystem Services in Coastal Tanzania

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More than 35% of mangrove areas worldwide have been degraded or lost entirely in the past 20 years, and this degradation has significant consequences for human wellbeing. Mangroves provide a number of ecosystem services that are particularly beneficial to low-income coastal communities. However, dependence on natural resources can lead to environmental degradation. Despite the importance of this interaction, there is a significant gap in understanding the relationship between mangrove ecosystem services and poverty traps, mechanisms that cause poverty to persist, in low income coastal communities. This interdisciplinary research is a first step toward advancing our understanding of ecosystem services through the lens of poverty traps. It empirically investigates important feedback loops, drivers and other mechanisms that link poverty traps and mangrove ecosystems at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This project will inform stakeholders involved in coastal resource management and poverty alleviation how changes in mangrove ecosystem services are associated with poverty and vice versa, and examine new approaches to break the vicious cycle of resource degradation and poverty. The findings can potentially be extended to efforts to sustain ecosystem services provided by other natural resources in developing economies.The research will be conducted in rural coastal Tanzania where degradation of mangrove resources and persistent poverty continue to be significant challenges. An interdisciplinary research team with expertise in economics, ecology, hydrology, climatology, and system modeling will undertake a two-year study to conceptualize and provide empirical evidence for the feedback loops, drivers, and thresholds existing within and across natural and human systems for multiple ecogeomorphological and poverty conditions. The researchers will collect and use a wide range of ecological and socioeconomic data by synchronizing the temporal and spatial scales at four sites. Four ecosystem services of mangrove forests that are likely interlinked with poverty will be examined: (a) goods extracted (fuel wood, building poles, and charcoal), (b) fish and shrimp habitats, (c) coastal protection, and (d) prospects for carbon storage (as a net carbon sink),which will be assessed as a potential source of revenue to break poverty-environment traps. The ecological processes of mangrove ecosystem functions and their services, as well as the decision rules related to natural resource use, management, and livelihood inferred from empirical evidence will then be used to build an agent-based model to scale up to a regional level. This approach will help identify system-wide effects under alternative scenarios and simulate directions in which the coupled systems can evolve to benefit both the environment and coastal communities.