On biodiversity conservation and poverty traps

Abstract

This paper introduces a special feature on biodiversity conservation and poverty traps. We define and explain the core concepts and then identify four distinct classes of mechanisms that define important interlinkages between biodiversity and poverty. The multiplicity of candidate mechanisms underscores a major challenge in designing policy appropriate across settings. This framework is then used to introduce the ensuing set of papers, which empirically explore these various mechanisms linking poverty traps and biodiversity conservation.development | ecosystem | natural resources | sustainability | wildlife S temming biodiversity loss and reducing poverty are global challenges of the first order, enshrined in both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Millennium Development Goals, agreed by virtually all countries over the past decade. The world is nonetheless struggling to meet the ambitions expressed in those global accords. The World Wide Fund for Nature International finds that the earth's wildlife populations have declined by a third over the past 35 y alone but by even more, 60%, in poorer tropical regions (1). The rate and magnitude of these losses will define the earth's sixth mass extinction period unless we quickly reverse this decline (2). Meanwhile, leaving aside the remarkable case of China, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased by more than 30% from 1981 to 2004 and now surpasses 1 billion (3).The persistence of extreme poverty and continued rapid loss of biodiversity appear intimately related. Extreme poverty and biodiversity hot spots are geographically coincident, concentrated in rural areas where livelihoods depend disproportionately on natural capital embodied in forests, rangelands, soils, water, and wildlife. Colocation naturally gives rise to closely coupled human-managed ecosystems that are in a precarious balance at best. Lack of resources, institutions, and governance structures often leaves local people illequipped to institute mechanisms to ensure long-term resource maintenance. Compounding this problem, the conditions of the human and nonhuman species within ecosystems coevolve in response to subtle shifts in any of several subsystems.Despite the importance of this coevolutionary relationship, connections between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation remain remarkably underexplored, not only in formal theorizing* but especially empirically. We have surprisingly little observational or experimental detail describing interactions in closely coupled human and natural systems in the rural tropics. In the absence of rigorous evidence on the synergies or tradeoffs between biodiversity conservation and escape from poverty traps, opinion and untested hypotheses predominate and crucial linkages are too often overlooked. Conservationists typically ignore the predictable consequences of human agency; people adapt behaviors in response to changes in environmental management, often generating unintended consequences that undermine conservation objectives (6). Simi...

Toward the Integrated Framework Analysis of Linkages among Agrobiodiversity, Livelihood Diversification, Ecological Systems, and Sustainability amid Global Change

“…Third, the role of migration remittances is complex and may be either detrimental or beneficial with regard to environmental impacts in sending communities [89,90], which has seemed to motivate the growing number of case studies of livelihood diversification and environmental impacts in development. Gendered social relations and their role in agriculture and land use are an increasingly important focus of these studies [112,[172][173][174][175][176][177][178]. Yet research has not focused as systematically as we do here across the geographic and interdisciplinary integration of multiple forms of livelihood diversification (e.g., migration, on-farm diversification), environmental resource-and environment-specific systems (e.g., agrobiodiversity, soil, water, uncultivated biodiversity), and related gender relations.…”

“…Generally, the process of disintensification is associated with livelihood diversification, although several studies mention it, and a few are able to demonstrate the increase of intensification, while others suggest the occurrence of no change in intensification level. Gender dynamics are critical to these trends, since in many cases women become the main farm managers, and this "feminization" of resource use exerts a major influence on the specifics of agricultural change (e.g., crop choice) and general outcomes (e.g., intensification or disintensification) [14,48,51,89,90,97,[172][173][174][175][176][177][196][197][198]. For example, the decline of chili pepper markets led to disintensification in the southern Yucatán region of Mexico through processes of livelihood diversification based on international migration and the influence of women's role in subsequent resource use [173,196,197].…”

Public health impacts of ecosystem change in the Brazilian Amazon

“…Ecosystem degradation and infectious diseases are central elements of a vicious cycle of rural poverty traps in the developing topics (11)(12)(13). Although these problems are not new, they continue to be of global concern and significance, especially in the context of climate change.…”

Conditions associated with protected area success in conservation and poverty reduction

“…A fundamental concern surrounding the establishment of protected areas, particularly in developing countries, is that ecosystem conservation goals may conflict with poverty alleviation goals by reducing incomes or perpetuating poverty traps (2)(3)(4)(5)(6). A poverty trap, as described in the introduction to this special feature in PNAS (7), is a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes an area to remain poor. By restricting access to natural resources, protected areas might create new poverty traps or reinforce old ones.…”