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Conservation groups could augment poverty alleviation in some remote areas mongabay.com July 30, 2008
The study says that because conservation organizations are already working in regions where some of the world's poorest rural populations live, they are have the potential to offer "unusual synergy" between protecting ecosystems and helping improve standards of living. "Impoverishment of both nature and people can serve as a rallying cry for a new socially responsible, long-term approach to conservation of the world’s wildlife and wild places," said the study’s lead author, Dr. Kent Redford, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Vice President and Director of the WCS Institute. "Although achieving the goals of both poverty alleviation and conservation is difficult, there may be specific institutional, ecological, and developmental circumstances under which this is possible. Wild areas present opportunities to test such circumstances." The study looked at infant mortality numbers as a proxy for poverty and overlaid it with WCS Human Footprint map, which shows degrees of human influence on the planet. It found that 0.25 percent of the world’s poor — or 16 million people — live in areas defined by the Human Footprint as either "somewhat wild" or "extremely wild." 1.35 billion live in or near urban areas defined as "very transformed" or "extremely transformed", of which 661 million live in the topics and sub-tropics. Most of the rural poor living in wild areas are found in Central and East Africa, according to the study. "Our analysis shows that priority areas for conservation of relatively wild nature coincide with areas inhabited by relatively few of the world’s poorest people (less than 0.5%). As a result, substantially retooling conservation organizations to deliver poverty alleviation goals would produce only marginal gains at the global scale and would severely compromise conservation missions," the authors write. "However, although the relative percentage of poor people is small, there are still c. 16 million poor people living in the world’s remotest regions. They are orphans of the major development assistance programmes because of their remoteness and low population densities. These same factors draw conservation organizations to the areas where they live, giving potential to an unusual synergy between conservation and poverty alleviation goals. "Adams et al. (2004) have pointed out that although achieving the goals of both poverty alleviation and conservation is difficult, there may be specific institutional, ecological and developmental circumstances under which this is possible. Wild areas present opportunities to test such circumstances. Impoverishment of both nature and people can serve as a rallying cry for a new socially responsible, long-term approach to conservation of the world’s wildlife and wild places," they conclude.
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