Emerton, L. (Lucy)

This report presents the proceedings of the workshop, held in Hanoi and attended by participants representing GEF International Waters projects and partner institutions from governments and NGOs. Some participants brought perspectives mostly from freshwater systems, others from marine ecosystems.

Value is a practical guide that explains the most important steps and techniques for the valuation of ecosystem services, and the incorporation of its results in decision making. It explains, step by step, how to generate persuasive arguments for more sustainable and equitable development decisions in water resources management.

The Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy Miyun project has generated important lessons about the process of working to improve landscapes and livelihoods in a watershed context. This paper documents and shares these lessons. In particular, it summarizes how the project was conceptualized and implemented, how and why this changed over time, and what its key impacts and achievements have been.

This paper documents insights and lessons about using markets and incentives to strengthen forest landscapes and livelihoods. It aims to interrogate just what a ‘landscape approach’ means in economic terms, to identify how markets can be used to generate incentives to share forest benefits more equitably and sustainably, and to highlight which kinds of approaches and ‘packages’ of interventions can assist in this.

It has become clear during recent global deliberations on biodiversity conservation that achieving Protected Area (PA) financial sustainability will require major changes in the way that PA funding is conceptualized, captured and used. With many, if not most, PAs facing funding crises, both in terms of the amount of funds available and how those are used, there is an urgent need to expand and diversify PA financial portfolios, and to ensure that funding reaches the groups and activities essential for biodiversity conservation.

This report has been commissioned by the Atoll Ecosystem Conservation Project at the Ministry of Housing, Transport and Environment, Government of Maldives, and its main objective is to quantify and demonstrate the economic value of the Maldivian coastal and marine biodiversity; and to provide an economic rationale for biodiversity conservation. The intention is that the analysis depicted can be used by various stakeholders to make the economic case for conservation and sustainable development.

In this toolkit, we focus on both human (socioeconomic) and biophysical (ecological) aspects of monitoring. Socioeconomic monitoring normally focuses on people’s knowledge and attitude towards an ecosystem as well as their natural resource use and dependence. Ecological monitoring on the other hand will generally focus on a specific species or ecosystem, using supporting information on environmental conditions and associated organisms.

The Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy (LLS) seeks to influence the ways in which forests are managed and used. It intends to leverage real and meaningful improvements in the livelihoods of the rural poor, enhance biodiversity conservation, and ensure the sustainable supply of forest goods and services. These goals are founded on a strong recognition of the close relationship between people’s economic wellbeing, and the status and integrity of forests. As described in this publication, economic factors have an extremely important influence on forest livelihoods and landscapes.