A major El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event emerged in early 2014, altering global weather patterns and sea surface temperatures (SST) from the tropical and southern Pacific to the Western Indian Ocean. Significant impacts have been reported in coastal Kenya, including flood-related disruption to livelihoods and damage to property. McClanahan (in preparation) reported that the SST anomaly was comparable with that recorded in 1997-1998, the strongest El Niño ever recorded, and has caused significant (up to 70% ) bleaching of the nation’s fringing reef, with unknown impacts on the fisheries. The Kenyan government made significant investments in preparedness and response planning for the 2015-2016 El Niño, but it is unclear how local communities and households responded to the event. Two ESPA funded projects, CESEA and SPACES, were operating in the southern area of Kenya. They have studied the interdependent coastal ecosystems of mangroves, seagrass meadows and coral reefs, and collected socio-economic data from coastal communities with high reliance on ecosystem services, such as artisanal fisheries and mangrove products. This supplementary project utilised the personnel, expertise and infrastructure of CESEA and SPACES to investigate the effects of El Niño at existing study sites.This project aims to better understand the links between ecosystem services (ES) and wellbeing in order to design and implement more effective interventions for poverty alleviation. We do this in the context of coastal, social-ecological systems in two poor African countries; Kenya and Mozambique. Despite recent policy and scientific interest in ES, there remain important knowledge gaps regarding how ecosystems actually contribute to wellbeing, and thus poverty alleviation. Following the ESPA framework, distinguishing ecological processes, 'final ES', 'capital inputs', 'goods' and 'values', this project is concerned with how these elements are interrelated to produce ES benefits, and focuses specifically on how these benefits are distributed to (potentially) benefit the poor, enhancing their wellbeing. We thus address the ESPA goal of understanding and promoting ways in which benefits to the poorest can be increased and more people can meet their basic needs, but we also identify conflicted tradeoffs, i.e. those which result in serious harm to either the ecosystem or poor people and which need urgent attention. Several fundamental questions are currently debated in international scientific and policy fora, relating to four major global trends which are likely to affect abilities of poor people to access ES benefits: (1) devolution of governance power and its impacts on local governance of ecosystems and production of ES, (2) unprecedented rates and scales of environmental change, particularly climate change, which are creating new vulnerabilities, opportunities and constraints, 'shifting baselines', and demanding radical changes in behaviour to cope, (3) market integration now reaches the most remote corners of the developing world, changing relationships between people and resources and motivations for natural resource management, (4) societal changes, including demographic, population, urbanisation and globalisation of culture, forge new relationships with ES and further decouple people from direct dependency on particular resources. Study sites have been chosen so as to gather empirical evidence to help answer key questions about how these four drivers of change affect abilities of poor people to benefit from ES. We aim for direct impact on the wellbeing of poor inhabitants of the rapidly transforming coastal areas in Mozambique and Kenya, where research will take place, while also providing indirect impact to coastal poor in other developing countries through our international impact strategy. Benefits from research findings will also accrue to multiple stakeholders at various levels. Local government, NGOs and civil society groups - through engagement with project activities, e.g. participation in workshops and exposure to new types of analysis and systems thinking. Donor organizations and development agencies - through research providing evidence to inform strategies to support sector development (e.g. fisheries, coastal planning and tourism development) and methods to understand and evaluate impacts of different development interventions - e.g. through tradeoff analysis and evaluation of the elasticities between ecosystem services and wellbeing. International scientific community - through dissemination of findings via conferences, scientific publications (open access), and from conceptual and theoretical development and new understandings of the multiple linkages between ecosystem services and wellbeing. Regional African scientists will benefit specifically through open courses offered within the scope of the project, and through dissemination of results at regional venues. Our strategies to deliver impact and benefits include (1) identifying 'windows of opportunity' within the context of ongoing coastal development processes to improve flows of benefits from ecosystems services to poor people, and (2) identifying and seeking to actively mitigate 'conflicted' tradeoffs in Kenya and Mozambique.

The research aimed to answer the research questions through empirical research at the community and household levels. Because of the complex impact pathways of El Niño, which may be unrecognisable, the research will explore the myriad stresses and shocks (exposures) faced by vulnerable coastal communities and households, and then ask probing questions about the recent El Niño episode and its connection to ecosystems and wellbeing dynamics. At the community level, a focus group was held in each of the four SPACES study sites (Kongowea, Mkwiro, Tsunza and Vanga) in southern Kenya. A range of participatory vulnerability assessment tools was employed to understand the stress, shock and vulnerability landscape at the community level, and to explore changes and responses induced by the recent El Niño episode. At the household level, interviews were held with the same individuals (where possible) sampled during the SPACES project in 2014 to understand changes in their wellbeing since then, and the relative role of El Niño related impacts. Household surveys also recorded perceptions of how the most important stresses and shocks identified in focus groups have affected them. Focus groups and household interviews were supplemented with document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key informants both within and external to each community to explore impacts, preparedness and responses to El Niño.