Can We Conserve Ecosystems by Fighting Poverty?

By Gregory Mock, editor and co-author of World Resources 2005: The Wealth of the Poor—Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty

Here’s a dream scenario: Conserve ecosystems by fighting poverty. Sound too good to be true? I was skeptical, too, when I began researching the idea three years ago. But why shouldn’t it be so? Ecosystems are the original source of wealth. Close to half of the world’s jobs are directly tied to forests, fisheries, farming, and other sources of environmental income. And that share is even higher throughout rural economies in the developing world, where most of the world’s poor reside.

Of course, most of the vast wealth of nature ends up in the pockets of the affluent—often extracted unsustainably. But the examples I found showed that, under the right circumstances, environmental income can both be captured by the poor and provide a path out of poverty.

I’m thinking of the case of Nam Pheng village in Laos, where villagers joined in a cooperative plan to sustainably harvest and market cardamom and bitter bamboo—both products of the local forest. Within a few years, income from these forest products brought 10 times the daily wages from slash-and-burn farming. After six years, the village’s poverty rate had been halved; diet and nutrition had improved; the death rate for children under 5 had fallen to zero; and the village still had a vital forest.

This example, and many others from around the world, demonstrate that restoring and conserving ecosystems actually increase the environment’s power to fight poverty and meet rural development goals such as higher household income, more secure livelihoods, and better education and health.

The truth is, effectively combating poverty requires caring for ecosystems. The environment, after all, is a crucial generator of household income for poor families. Forests alone provide 22 percent of household income to families living nearby, according to a 2004 World Bank study. And most of this income is not from timber, but from nontimber products such as fuelwood, wild foods, medicine and fodder for livestock.

The development community has been slow to embrace good ecosystem management as a strategy for poverty reduction. That’s unfortunate, because the poverty-alleviation strategies most developing nations have pursued—encouraging urban industries, agribusiness, and large-scale forestry, fishing, and mining operations—have largely failed to deliver jobs or the other benefits of development to rural residents. Even in China, which has lifted 400 million people out of poverty in the past two decades, nearly 150 million people continue to live in poverty, most of them in rural areas.

I believe this kind of positive change has been slow in coming simply because it’s hard work. Making the environment an economic stepping stone for the poor requires changes in governance—changes in who controls ecosystems and who gains the benefits and bears the costs of managing them.

Poor families frequently don’t control the ecosystems they live in and rely on. Oftentimes ecosystems are owned by the state, even though generations of families may have occupied the land or fished the waters. Successful examples of using ecosystem income to reduce poverty almost always involve reversing this situation, with the state granting local communities some form of legal right to manage and reap the benefits of local resources. This kind of secure resource right helps community members begin to see ecosystems as the valuable assets they are, and provides the rationale for conservation as a community investment. In Fiji, the government has granted villagers management rights to traditional shore-side fishing grounds, and helps villages to draw up and enforce sustainable management plans, which include no-take zones. One result is a resurgence of clam populations, which are a mainstay of the local diet and a key cash source.

It’s high time the development community recognized the power of this approach. Turning ecosystem assets into sustainable income for the poor demands both conservation and good governance that empowers the poor with resource rights. The evidence I’ve seen shows this is not an idle dream, but a powerful base for the sustainable growth of rural economies and real progress against poverty.