A commonly held belief is that if people can benefit financially from enterprises that depend on nearby forests, reefs, and other natural habitats, then they will take action to conserve and sustainably use them. The Biodiversity Conservation Network brought together conservation and development organizations and local communities to systematically test this hypothesis across 39 conservation project sites in Asia and the Pacific. Each project implemented one or more community‐based enterprises such as setting up an ecotourism lodge, distilling essential oils from wild plant roots, producing jams and jellies from forest fruits, harvesting timber, or collecting marine samples to test for pharmaceutical compounds. Each project team collected the biological, enterprise, and social data necessary to test the network's hypothesis. We present the results of this test. We found that a community‐based enterprise strategy can lead to conservation, but only under limited conditions and never on its own. We summarize the specific conditions under which an enterprise strategy will and will not work in a decision chart that can be used by project managers to determine whether this strategy might make sense at their site. We also found that an enterprise strategy can be subsidized and still create a net gain that pays for conservation. Based on our experiences, we recommend developing “learning portfolios” that combine action and research to test other conservation strategies.

Using 2016 household survey data from Tanzania, we define and measure resilience within the context of Population, Health, and Environment programming and quantify the link between resilience and family planning. We created a multicomponent model using confirmatory factor analysis in a structural equation modeling context. Factor loadings for eight defined latent factors of resilience were statistically significant (p < 0.001). We created a factor called “FP-MCH” reflecting awareness, attitudes, and access to family planning (FP) and health care services and use of maternal and child health care (MCH) facilities. Analysis, with controls, shows that a 1 standard deviation (SD) increase in FP/MCH was associated with a 0.68 SD increase in resilience (p < 0.01), suggesting that the association between FP/MCH and resilience is robust across a range of factors. Analyses showed that the association between FP/MCH is broadly related to the construct of resilience and not through any single component. This study supports the importance of including FP/MCH as part of integrated projects to enhance resilience.

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Background Since 2011, Pathfinder International, The Nature Conservancy, and local government authorities in western Tanzania have partnered on the Tuungane project to support communities facing multiple challenges not solved by a single sector, including poor access to health services such as maternal health and family planning, as well as a declining natural resource base. Tuungane uses a population, health, and environment approach that hypothesises that by integrating health and conservation activities, it can achieve greater overall benefits to both people and nature than single-sector projects. We investigated whether integrating health and conservation services and information leads to greater understanding of the links between people's health and the environment, resulting in more behaviours that improve health and increase sustainable natural resource management.Methods Using data from cross-sectional surveys done at the household level in western Tanzania, we assessed health and natural resource knowledge, attitudes, and practices, comparing baseline data collected in July, 2011, from 487 households (of 7700 households) with midterm data collected 5 years later in August, 2016, from 1010 households (of 9568 households). Data from a smaller assessment done in December, 2020, will be available later.Findings Between the baseline survey and the midterm survey, we found improvements in indicators for health and conservation knowledge, attitudes, and practices, and overall wellbeing. For example, most common illnesses, such as typhoid, decreased. Familiarity with family planning increased from 45% to 59%. Women who wished they could have postponed a pregnancy decreased from 43% to 34%. Fishermen reported an increase from 8% to 33% in fish catch in the main target species compared with 5 years ago. In 2016, a majority of people agreed that the village forest should be protected (88%). The ability of people to meet daily needs increased from 6% to 20%. People used fewer loans to buy food and had more assets. InterpretationThe results from the surveys suggest that not only the health and natural resource use of local people improved from 2011 to 2016, but also their overall wellbeing.