ESPA: Assessing Health, Livelihoods, Ecosystem Services And Poverty Alleviation In Populous Deltas

Working in close relationship with the government of Bangladesh the ESPA project will develop and apply multi-disciplinary methods that are transferable across other populous delta systems. The project will link with other relevant UK ES research projects and follow-up ESRC-funded work on community fisheries in Orissa.

The key objects of the project can be summarised as:

• To understand the present relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being and health in the Bangladeshi portion of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta.


• To develop participatory methods to predict how these ecosystem services might evolve over the coming years and decades (up to 50 years) and their influence on human well-being and health under the multiple drivers of change in operation.


• To analyse how policy can influence these outcomes and promote ecosystem services and human well-being and health.


• To develop participatory methods to select robust policies that are effective across the range of uncertainty, including adaptive management approaches.


• To test the transferability of these methods to other populated deltas.