摘要：It has been argued that ecosystem services can be used as the foundation to provide economic opportunities toempower the disadvantaged. The Ecosystem Services Framework (ESF) approach for poverty alleviation, which balancesresource conservation and human resource use, has received much attention in the literature. However, few projects havesuccessfully achieved both conservation and economic objectives. This is partly due to there being a hiatus between theory andpractice, due to the absence of tools that help make the transition between conceptual frameworks and theory, to practicalintegration of ecosystem services into decision making. To address this hiatus, an existing conceptual framework for analyzingthe robustness of social-ecological systems was translated into a practical toolkit to help understand the complexity of social-ecological systems (SES). The toolkit can be used by a diversity of stakeholders as a decision making aid for assessing ecosystemservices supply and demand and associated enterprise opportunities. The toolkit is participatory and combines both a generic"top-down" scientific approach with a case-specific "bottom-up" approach. It promotes a shared understanding of the utilizationof ecosystem services, which is the foundation of identifying resilient enterprises. The toolkit comprises four steps: (i) ecosystemservices supply and demand assessment; (ii) roles identification; (iii) enterprise opportunity identification; and (vi) enterpriserisk assessment, and was tested at two estuary study sites. Implementation of the toolkit requires the populating of preprogrammedExcel worksheets through the holding of workshops that are attended by stakeholders associated with the ecosystems. It wasconcluded that for an enterprise to be resilient, it must be resilient at an external SES level,which the toolkit addresses, and atan internal business functioning level, e.g., social dynamics among personnel, skills, and literacy levels. Although the toolkitdoes not address the internal resilience level of an enterprise, it proved helpful at indicating which enterprises show potentialresilience given current SES conditions
