Swahili Seas

生活在东非海岸的人们是世界上最贫穷的人之一。他们的生计和安全严重依赖当地生态系统；例如，红树林为他们提供木柴、鱼类、药品，并保护他们免受洪水和海岸侵蚀。尽管红树林很重要，但它们正遭受着很高的破坏率。该项目将开创研究、评估和管理红树林的新方法，并将向在其他类型生态系统中工作的团体交流所吸取的经验教训。红树林在捕获碳方面具有很高的生产力和效率，其中大部分最终被埋在地下，因此可以永久储存在远离大气的地方。这为使用碳信用额度的支付来帮助红树林保护和为当地居民带来收入开辟了可能性。该项目将结合肯尼亚和英国科学家的专业知识、第三方慈善机构的认证以及Gazi妇女红树林木板路委员会的承诺和组织，启动如何实现这一目标的真正示范。一名肯亚社会学学生将详细研究此计画的发展，并记录所吸取的教训。她将特别关注不同的群体，如男性和女性，老年人和年轻人，如何参与并受益，红树林资源的管理如何运作，以及该项目如何告知该地区其他使用生态系统服务付费的人。红树林生态系统对当地人的价值，尤其是对穷人的价值，往往被开发商和政治家们低估了。对个别地点的经济价值进行全面估计可能是困难和昂贵的——一种选择是将结果从研究得很好的地区转移到其他地点，但是这种方法未经对红树林进行测试，可能导致很大的误差。我们将通过在肯尼亚的七个不同地点测量一系列直接使用价值（包括薪材、木材、螃蟹和虾）来测试这种“利益转移”方法。通过寻找这些结果与有助于预测结果的变量之间的相关性，例如贫困水平和人口密度，并通过比较当地人对其红树林资源价值的看法，我们将确定不同地点之间利益转移的可靠性，这将使我们能够计算肯尼亚红树林资源的经济价值。由于碳储存是红树林的一个关键好处，因此对发展中国家来说，了解其森林的范围和其中的碳生物量是很重要的，但是在实地测量这些数据既昂贵又困难。我们将使用遥感技术为东非开发“碳景观”，以确定不同地区的碳生物量（包括地下储存的碳）。我们将把这些地图与“风险地图”和“价值地图”结合起来，显示高威胁和高价值的地区，并将这些地图呈现在一个用户友好的平台上，供政府和非政府组织在制定项目和政策时使用。至关重要的是，发展中国家必须有能力识别对其人民生计的威胁，并对保护资金的国际机会作出反应，例如来自气候变化谈判的机会。不幸的是，他们往往过度依赖昂贵的海外顾问。这个项目建立在肯尼亚和英国科学家之间8年的合作基础上，这些科学家在培训非洲同事方面有着良好的记录。我们将继续这一传统，培训三名学生达到硕士水平，提供定制的商业和创业培训，以帮助确保后续资金，并在论文和新提案上共同努力。我们建立了一个东非论坛，以确保在生态系统服务支付的科学和实践方面进行良好的区域交流。这项工作将得到进一步发展，并将与西非的有关经验建立新的联系。

People living on the coast of East Africa are amongst the World's poorest. They rely heavily on local ecosystems for their livelihoods and security; for example mangrove forests provide them with firewood, fish, medicines and protection from floods and coastal erosion. Despite the importance of mangroves they are suffering high rates of destruction. This project will pioneer new ways of studying, evaluating and managing mangroves, and will communicate the lessons learnt to groups working in other types of ecosystems. Mangrove forests are highly productive and efficient at capturing carbon, much of which ends up buried below ground and can therefore be permanently stored away from the atmosphere. This opens up possibilities for using payments for carbon credits to help mangrove conservation and to bring revenue for local people. This project will initiate a real demonstration of how to achieve this, combining the expertise of Kenyan and UK scientists, accreditation by a third party charity and the commitment and organisation of the Gazi Womens' Mangrove Boardwalk Committee. A Kenyan sociology student will make a detailed study of the development of this project to record the lessons learnt. She will particularly focus on how different groups, such as men and women and old and young, become engaged and benefit, on how the management of the mangrove resource works and on how this project can inform others in the region that use payments for ecosystem services. The value of mangrove ecosystems to local people, and particularly to the poor, is often underestimated by developers and politicians. Full estimations of economic value for individual sites can be difficult and expensive - one option is to transfer the results from well studied areas to other sites, but this approach is untested for mangroves and may lead to large errors. We will test this 'benefit transfer' approach by measuring a range of direct use values (including for fuelwood, timber, crabs and shrimp) at seven different sites in Kenya. By looking for correlations between these results and variables that can help predict them, such as levels of poverty and population density, and by comparing what local people say about the value of their mangrove resources, we will determine the reliability of benefit transfer between sites, which will allow us to calculate the economic value of the mangrove resource in Kenya. Since carbon storage is a key benefit of mangroves it is important for developing countries to know the extent of their forests and the biomass of carbon in them, but measuring this on the ground is expensive and difficult. We will use remote sensing techniques to develop 'carbon landscapes' for East Africa that identify the biomass of carbon (including that stored below-ground) in different areas. We will combine these maps with 'risk maps' and 'value maps' that show areas under high threat and with high value, and present these on a user-friendly platform that can be accessed by government and NGOs when developing projects and policy. It is essential that developing countries have the capacity to identify threats to their people's livelihoods and to respond to international opportunities for conservation financing, such as those coming from climate change negotiations. Unfortunately there is often an over-reliance on expensive, overseas consultants. This project builds on eight years of collaboration between Kenyan and UK scientists with a track record of training for African colleagues. We will continue this tradition by training three students to masters level, by giving bespoke business and entrepreneurial training to help ensure follow-on funding and by working together on papers and new proposals. We have established an East African forum to ensure good regional communication on the science and practice of payments for ecosystem services. This will be further developed and new links with relevant experience in West Africa will be established.