Sustainable Poverty Alleviation from Coastal Ecosystem Services: Wellbeing, 2013-2017

The first part of the SPACES project involved populating ES-WB chains with data obtained from each of the 8 sites studied to help answer one of the overarching questions seeking to understand the complex and elastic relationship between ecosystem and wellbeing outcomes (ES – WB chains). This was aimed at helping us explore more dynamic and policy-relevant aspects of ES-WB links as we highlighted relationships and links between chains, feedbacks within chains and identified windows of opportunity where interventions could lead to ES benefits to those most in need. However after the first components of the project were realized, a few gaps were still apparent. Firstly, access had not been sufficiently explored for different goods perceived in the survey (what is needed to gain access to specific livelihoods/food sources). Secondly, the WB contribution of ES goods had not been explored in enough detail. For example, the income of fishermen does not necessarily solely contribute to their economic security but may have an impact on their subjective WB, respect, relationships, autonomy, etc. Since SPACES aimed to inform policy and suggest potential interventions and highlight windows of opportunity to improve the flow of ES benefits to those most in need (and hence improve their WB), we needed to ensure that proposed interventions didn’t have negative effects on aspects of individuals’ wider WB (as opposed to ES specific WB). Therefore, we also wanted to explore individuals’ general WB and perceived factors that influence it. The proposed methodology consequently aimed to (1) focus on a wide range of ES chains, not solely monetary or pre-defined ES benefits, (2) look at the contribution of ES goods/value attributes to different aspects of WB, (3) look at access mechanisms to each ES benefit, and (4) look at WB in a wider context (not solely linked to ES).