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		Nature Conservancy Magazine: Summer 2006 Nature Conservancy Magazine Waiting for the Sky Poverty, Conservation   Audio chat Full Circle Nature Stories Podcast Nature Landmarks Nature Books Nature Travel Nature Preserves Subscribe Previous Issues

The Poverty / Conservation Equation

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One Dominican community has flourished, in part, by shifting away from traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. Los Dajaos now uses a low-tech lab with glass milk bottles to grow strawberry seedlings and other crops (top) and raises rabbits as an environmentally friendly alternative to cattle (bottom). Photos © Carolyn Drake   Framing the Debate Does Conservation Matter to the Poor? by Jeffrey Sachs Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? by M.A. Sanjayan Can We Conserve Ecosystems by Fighting Poverty? by Gregory Mock

Charged with the task of protecting lands in areas struggling with poverty, the Conservancy’s team in the Dominican Republic recognized it needed a different game plan. “With more than half of the people in Hispaniola living in poverty, we simply have to look at both poverty and environmental issues to get conservation work done,” says Sanchez. “We realize whatever we do with the environment, we also have to take care of people.”

Until recently, this philosophy would have been dismissed as mission drift or even heresy to some within the conservation movement. But over the past two decades, growing global concern over poverty has increased pressure on conservationists to find “win-win” solutions for preserving lands without ignoring the plight of poor neighbors.

“If we are to reach the world’s population in India, China, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America,” says M.A. Sanjayan, one of the Conservancy’s lead scientists, “we are going to have to fundamentally change what we mean by conservation and what conservation means to people’s lives.”

The 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg represented a major turning point. A decade earlier, at the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, conservationists were calling the shots on how to protect the world’s biodiversity havens. But by 2002, Sanjayan says, “we didn’t even have a seat at the table.” The reason, he says, is that for too long conservationists had ignored the role of poor people in the environment—and the importance of making them partners in its preservation.

Today, hundreds of “pro-poor” conservation projects are under way throughout the developing world. And the Conservancy is part of efforts to restore local resources—fisheries, forest watersheds, farm fields—that are also helping people escape poverty.
 
In remote areas of China’s Yunnan Province, for example, the Conservancy is working to reduce reliance on firewood by the half-million families who live there—and who currently cut more than 300,000 acres of forest each year—by helping them install household biogas units, solar heating panels and fuel-efficient stoves.

Yet while a growing number of conservation projects are now working in concert with development efforts, little research has been done into what factors lead to solutions that benefit both local residents and biodiversity. “It is an area of research that’s in its infancy,” says Craig Leisher, a Conservancy economist who is leading a study of four conservation projects in Asia and the Pacific to quantify their effects on local residents. He has already come to one conclusion: “Local people are often the best people in developing countries to manage these conservation areas, because they want them to survive in the long term as well."

In the Dominican Republic, that philosophy is at the heart of the Conservancy’s approach, which involves local communities in virtually every step of the conservation process. “We don’t present solutions,” says Francisco Nuñez, the Conservancy’s lead scientist in the country. “We put scenarios on the table and let them decide.”

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