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The impacts of urbanisation on ecosystems and the dependence of urban populations on ecosystem services are widely acknowledged but poorly understood. In the Global South, rural–urban linkages are increasingly shaped and transformed by the processes of peri-urbanisation, through which rural areas become increasingly enmeshed in a mosaic of rural and urban land use and juxtaposed rural and urban livelihoods and overlapping institutions. Peri-urban areas are frontiers of sustainability transformations, where deep and sustained engagement with communities of the poor, and enhanced understanding of dynamic ecosystem service-poverty alleviation interactions, can reveal possibilities to improve the health and livelihoods of both urban and peri-urban residents, whilst also supporting more effective, efficient and equitable management of environmental resources. We demonstrate this through an …