Foreign Collaboration

IBRADs collaboration with Nottingham University and Kings College, London

IBRADs collaboration with Kings College, London and Nottingham University would seek to explore the diverse understanding of ecosystem services amongst the research, policy and practitioner communities in India, especially in the context of hills, plains and coastal forest ecosystems. It would further seek to explore the extent to which line departments of the government dealing with land-based natural resources integrate the ecosystem concept in their diverse management strategies. A further challenge involves making sure these strategies work on the ground.

Ecosystem services Initiative Workshop on Forest Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) in collaboration with Nottingham university, UK

The workshop was held in IBRAD campus from 15.12.2010 to 18.12.2010. Often, it is witnessed and documented that different line departments such as the forest ,agriculture, irrigation, horticulture, soil conservation who need to work in an integrated manner, work in isolation depending on their own agenda(.ref planning commission mid-term appraisal of 11th five year plan july2010). This has been major block in managing forest mosaic landscape with agriculture and horticulture. Such isolated management approach also fragments the ecosystem which has severe consequences on Ecosystem Services.

Objectives of the workshop were:

• How the participating sectors like forest ,agriculture , horticulture , irrigation and NGOs and community will work together and develop an integrated approach towards Ecosystem Service
• How other participating academic institutes like University of Nottingham, XLRI Jamshedpur, Jadavpur University NAEB, IBRAD can contribute through research for understanding the ecosystem process and benefits as ecosystem service to address the problems of poverty of people.
• How to involve different stake holders as partners in the ESPA project by sharing the objective of ESPA and their roles the study. The workshop also provided the opportunity to learn the expectation of the partners and how best they can contribute in the project.
• Interaction among the members of the consortium provided opportunity to develop outline the drafting of the proposal of ESPA.
• Followed by the workshop a field visit was covered in Mahabebnagar in the first phase and Kankinara forest department in the second phase in Andhrapradesh