Rights and Resources - News: Forest Conservation and Poverty Reduction: the hunt for synergies

Savings banks, safety nets or poverty traps? What do forests and forest products really mean to the rural poor? There is little evidence that forests are actually capable of lifting people out of poverty on their own. So are forests, and non-timber forest products in particular, better characterized as poverty traps? We don't think so. If rural people who depend on forests tend to be locked into poverty this is more because of institutional and political structures that perpetuate existing inequalities, rather than any inherent characteristics of forest products themselves.

On the other hand, forest conservation has a mixed record in poverty reduction. In some cases, protected forest areas have provided new economic options that improve poor people's livelihoods but in many others they have resulted in restricted access to forest resources that further deprive the most disenfranchised, offering little or nothing by way of compensation. This issue of arborvitae takes a balanced yet critical look at both sides of the forests-poverty story and debate. Several authors also identify creative solutions and key policy changes that are required to enable forests and forest conservation to play a bigger part in poverty reduction.

Conservationists need to do more than simply lament the weakening of the environmental commitments and momentum of the early 1990s and the fact that donors have redirected resources from saving forests to lifting people out of poverty. We should not shy away from pointing out that current development strategies tend to favour urban areas and bypass large numbers of forest-dependent rural poor. We should use our knowledge of biophysical systems and how people use them to identify poverty-reducing linkages within our forest conservation work. Finally, we should be explicit that sometimes strict protection is the only viable option to conserve biodiversity but that this has to be accompanied by fair and equitable compensation that improves development opportunities for affected communities and individuals.

For sure, conservation and poverty reduction are not always compatible, and win-win situations are rare. Yet, the more open we are about these trade-offs and the more practical solutions we can offer, the better placed we will be to ensure that the conservation and sustainable use of forests is mainstreamed into the delivery of current global development priorities.

(Stewart Maginnis, IUCN and Mark Aldrich, WWF)

Posted By Megan Liddle at 8:40am on January 26, 2006

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Forest Conservation and Poverty Reduction: the hunt for synergies

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