Attaining Sustainable Services from Ecosystems through Trade-off Scenarios, Malawi, 2012-2016

Torres Vitolas, Carlos and Madise, Nyovani and Schreckenberg, Kate and Harvey, Celia and Kraft, Franziska and Tsirizeni, Mathews and Kafumbata, Dalitso (2022). Attaining Sustainable Services from Ecosystems through Trade-off Scenarios, Malawi, 2012-2016. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855396

Food security in poor rural communities often relies significantly on flows of ecosystem services from 'natural' environments. For millennia mankind has engaged in thinking and learning experiences which have shaped the processes underpinning the production of food and the management of land, addressing multiple factors and tradeoffs. However, many food production systems require intensive management and are prone to failure outside of the range of their optimal environmental conditions. Concerns are growing about the ability of current agricultural systems to support rising human populations without further degrading critical ecosystem services (such as water provisioning, pollination). During extreme events, such as drought, or other shocks or crises (environmental, social or economic), the dependence of rural communities on ecosystem services to meet their nutritional and livelihood needs often increases. This highlights the importance of minimising the impacts of agricultural systems on ecosystems and the services they provide. Strategies for coping with food insecurity may, in turn, have an impact on the capacity of ecosystems to deliver ecosystem services as the spatial and temporal nature of feedbacks between socio-economic and ecological systems can be complex. This project aimed to explicitly quantify the linkages between ecosystem services that affect - and are affected by - food security and nutritional health for the rural poor at the forest-agricultural interface. By integrating a suite of complexity tools and cutting edge models with more traditional participatory assessments in the field, the project aimed to identify how dynamic ecosystem services at the landscape scale translate to local-level nutritional diets and health and to inform policy makers on how future land use and climate change will affect both food security and the ecosystem services associated with it. Addressing the sustainability of natural resource management and rural livelihoods requires integrated thinking across disciplines. The complex transformations which can, or have already occurred from natural forest to managed landscapes must be fully understood so that systems can be adopted which promote sustainable transformations and/or can mitigate any negative impacts. This project therefore brought together expertise in social sciences, economics, ecology, risk management, spatial planning, climate change and complexity sciences to design and integrate a suite of models and methods to analyse how dynamic stocks and flows of ecosystem services translate to local-level food security and nutritional health. The project examined the multiple (and multi-directional) links between ecosystem services, food security and maternal and child health outcomes in poor rural communities, addressing three main themes: (1) Drivers, pressures and linkages between food security, nutritional health and ecosystem services; (2) Crises and tipping points: Past, present and future interactions between food insecurity and ecosystem services at the forest-agricultural interface; (3) The science-policy interface: How can we manage ecosystem services to reduce food insecurity and increase nutritional health?

Data description (abstract)

Research for ASSETS was conducted in Peru, Colombia, and Malawi. This collection contains the data collected in Malawi. The objectives were: • To obtain information on the nutritional condition of children under five years of age that permit estimating stunting rates in the region. • To obtain socio-demographic indicators for rural households inhabiting the Amazon Basin. • Generate information on material living conditions among poor rural settings in the Amazon Basin. • Obtain information that allows assessing food (in)security conditions among poor rural households in the Amazon Basin. • Provide data that helps generating rural income estimates among rural households of the Amazon Basin. • Provide information that helps generating expenditure estimates for rural households in the Amazon region. • Generate quantitative information stating nature’s contributions to rural residents’ basic needs and income generation activities. • Provide socioeconomic and environmental indicators comparable to government’s’ nationwide living standards measurement studies and parallel surveys taking place in Colombia and Malawi. The household survey was divided into different modules covering various topics, including: • Socio-demographic characteristics of household members • Education • Health and maternity • Time use and employment • Housing and material living conditions • Food consumption and food security • Subjective wellbeing • Anthropometric measures (children under 5) • Farm characteristics: agriculture and livestock • Extractive activities: fishing, hunting, and wood-extraction

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