Integrating Ecology and Poverty Reduction

At the writing of this book, the world is at a critical crossroads. The year 2010 was the United Nations (U.N.) year of biodiversity and the year when the targets of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), which was signed in 2002, were supposed to have been met. The CBD aimed to achieve by 2010 a “significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels as a contribution to poverty reduction and to the benefit of all life on Earth.” However, progress remains elusive – species extinction rates continue to be 1,000 times greater than background rates in the geological record (Secretariat of the CBD 2006; Walpole et al. 2009, 2010; Butchart et al. 2010).

Throughout this volume, as we seek to think about new or enhanced ways in which ecology can be applied to address poverty, it is critical to consider the social, cultural, and economic traditions that may support or challenge the adoption of an ecologically based approach to development. Two key, interconnected areas in which societal norms are critical to furthering poverty reduction and sustainable natural resource management in developing countries include education and gender. Education is widely recognized as an important component in reducing poverty and a key to wealth creation (UNESCO 2003). While the rural poor in general lack access to formal education, women and girls have significantly fewer opportunities to access education than men and boys (UNESCO 2003). Education is not the only sphere in which gender equalities exist. Women perform 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the food, but earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property (UNICEF 2007). Yet, improving the lives of women and girls can be an effective way to prevent disease, reduce hunger, and raise Gross Domestic Product (Kristof and WuDunn 2009). Increasing appreciation of the importance of education and gender equality in development initiatives is reflected in Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 2, which focuses on education, and MDG 3, which focuses on gender equality. Linking gender equality, education, and ecology is important in development initiatives where the value of functioning ecosystems is critical to human livelihood.

Many of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. They depend on environmental resources for their health and well-being. The rural poor depend disproportionately on trees, freshwater streams, pollinators, mangroves, and rainfall (UN Millennium Project 2005). Many rural people have grown up in those rural areas; they come from generations of rural producers—herders, farmers, hunters, and gathers—who collectively possess an unwritten library of local knowledge, intelligence, skills, and technologies about how to survive and thrive on what local ecosystems can provide.

Gender issues in conservation and rural development have been a topic of ­discussion within research and development institutions since the 1980s. Women have been excluded from many programs and projects both because of the traditional values of some cultures and because of the prejudice inherent in many development efforts of the time. Lack of participation in development programs has had long-term implications not only for the women themselves, but also for their children. Furthermore, focusing exclusively on men meant many programs failed to attain their goals for several reasons. In some cases, the information given to men was not communicated to women who were responsible for applying the information. In other cases, the focus of the project pertained to women’s work and often the men who received the information or participated in the demonstration projects did not know what questions to ask. Some efforts targeted at men had adverse effects on women by changing agricultural processes in ways that negatively impacted women and their children. For example, the focus on cash crops often led to a decrease in subsistence farming and degradation of soils and, thus, increased food insecurity. Traditional views of development and of aid programs were based upon assumptions about who did what work and who made what decisions, which were not always reflective of reality. Thus, programs that intended to increase access to household resources were targeted at the male head of the household with the assumption that knowledge and information would trickle down to the rest of the household. These approaches also made unfounded assumptions about knowledge and knowledge transfer. A focus on gender has helped to broaden our understanding of how people learn and what skills and techniques are useful in effectively transferring information and expertise from one context to another. Women’s demands that their voices be heard led to an ­understanding of the importance of recognizing and valuing local knowledge as part of an information exchange. The focus on gender encouraged a deeper look at equity issues, not just those related to gender, but also in relation to the role of technology transfer and how technologies can impact groups of people differently. In some cases, new technologies introduced and adopted by one group can lead to increased burdens for others. Thus, the introduction of motor bikes increased men’s freedom and range of action, but increased the burden of work for those left behind. The critiques of development emerging from the analysis of gender have led to a deeper understanding of how societies function and how change occurs within particular societies. These analyses were important to formulating policies that support endogenous development.

This section includes chapters addressing population growth, migration, and ­urbanization as they relate to the ecology–poverty nexus. The work in the field of population–environment studies has been the province of demographers, geographers, sociologists, economists, and, perhaps pre-eminently, ecologists, through the seminal works of Duncan (1964), Hardin (1968), and Ehrlich and Holdren (1971). In the ecological contributions to this literature, population size, density, growth, and re-distribution (in the form of urbanization) are often presented as primary drivers of environmental problems, and the solution proposed is to reduce or reverse growth rates, or to set aside ecologically sensitive areas in parks. In the extreme, Garrett Hardin (1974a, b) proposed that poverty be allowed to run its course, unfettered by foreign aid, so that rapidly growing developing countries would better experience the “positive checks” on population growth of famine, misery, plague, and war postulated by Malthus 200 years ago. This he termed “life boat ethics.”

The world’s population of nearly one billion in 1800 has grown to approximately 6.9 billion today, and population projections suggest that the world population will fall somewhere between 8 and 10.5 billion by 2050, depending on changes in national level fertility and mortality rates (UNPD 2010). Nearly all of the world’s net population growth over the coming 40 years will occur in cities in less developed countries.

The poverty–environment–migration triad sustains a complex relationship characterized by contradictory and ambiguous effects and multiple feedbacks (Locke et al. 2000; Adger et al. 2002). Population mobility¹ may both directly or indirectly contribute to poverty reduction (e.g., through remittances, diversification of livelihoods, improved living conditions, access to social and other services, and expansion of networks), or to the exacerbation of poverty (e.g., accelerate aging in sending communities, brain drain, community weakening, impoverishment of displaced populations, or raising unemployment in receiving communities). Similarly, migration may have environmental impacts (frontier settlements change land use patterns; growing population density in sensitive and/or hazardous areas exacerbates ecological deterioration; depopulation facilitates forest re-growth; remittances may accelerate adoption of green technologies) and in turn migration can be a demographic response to environmental change and deterioration, as in the case of environmentally induced displacement. Finally, migration may be a mediating factor between poverty reduction and ecosystem health – either facilitating a positive feedback (e.g., remittances may lessen the income demands for resource extraction in origin communities) or exacerbating a negative feedback relationship (e.g., remittances may provide the technological investments to accelerate resource extraction).

Cities and the urbanization process are often portrayed as environmental villains (Odum 1991; Srinivas 2000; White 1983; Brown and Jacobson 1987; Marshall 2005; Wackernagel and Rees 1996). For example, analysts focused on the “green agenda” of biodiversity conservation often suggest that urbanization is a major driver of environmental harm (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; York et al. 2003). Cities have been depicted as dystopias of poverty, chaos, and confusion (Linden 1996). By some estimates, almost one billion urban dwellers are living in poverty in today’s cities (Satterthwaite 2007), and the numbers are predicted to continue growing (Davis 2007; UNFPA 2007). Hence, when it comes to both environmental harm and poverty, the reputation of cities and the urbanization process itself are considered as suspect at best.

The goal of balancing biodiversity conservation with poverty reduction has challenged conservationists and development practitioners for years (Adams et al. 2004). Efforts such as Community Based Conservation, Integrated Conservation and Development Programs, and sustainable forest management have all attempted to do this, but the linkages between conservation and economic benefits for communities have often been too indirect or vague for these approaches to achieve both goals. Furthermore, in many of these cases, the tradeoffs among conservation and poverty reduction have often outweighed the synergies (Wunder 2007). For these reasons, innovative financial mechanisms, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), have emerged as a more efficient, and direct way to balance conservation and development (Ferraro and Kiss 2002). While many functioning PES programs have been implemented in developed countries, the idea of PES has become attractive in poor, rural areas of tropical counties, where there are high concentrations of biodiversity that support a range of ecosystem services and where payments may help reduce poverty of poor rural ecosystem service managers. However, there are few examples and analyses of the enabling conditions needed to establish PES programs in developing countries and what their success has been for supporting livelihoods and conservation. Thus, it is difficult to judge if these mechanisms are as promising as they seem to be for achieving both conservation and poverty reduction.

In the twenty-first century, we are challenged to dramatically transform the way we view, value, and manage our planet’s ecosystems. Healthy ecosystems have long been understood to produce ‘goods,’ such as food and fiber, that have a market value within the prevailing economic paradigm; however, the ‘services’ of these ecosystems have either been undervalued or not valued at all. These are ecosystems that provide trillions of dollars worth of clean water, flood protection, fertile lands, clean air, pollination, and disease control. These services are essential to maintaining livable conditions and are delivered by the world’s ecosystems, in effect, the world’s largest ‘utilities.’ Yet, over 60% of these ‘utilities’ are on the verge of collapse or are being used in ways that cannot be sustained (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).

The international carbon market – comprising both the regulated national, regional, and international markets resulting from the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and the voluntary trade of carbon offsets by individuals, companies, NGOs, and governments outside the Kyoto framework – is currently considered the most important new and additional source of development finance, valued at US$126 billion in 2008 and potentially exceeding USD$50–120 billion/year in the long term (Capoor and Ambrosi 2009). Given the great potential for the implementation of alternatives to mitigate carbon emissions in the Land Use, Land Use and Forestry (LULUCF) sector in the tropics and the fact that over 70% of the world’s poor are located in rural areas, great expectations have been put on the capacity of this innovative source of funding to support rural poverty reduction initiatives in developing countries.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly considered an important approach to solving global environmental challenges (Daily 1997; Ferraro and Kiss 2002). PES approaches provide individuals or communities with financial incentives for resource use decisions that increase the provision of ecosystem services such as water purification, flood mitigation, or carbon sequestration (Jack et al. 2008). Intense pressure on ecosystems has catalyzed the development of such market-based tools to seek to influence environmental behavior. The rationale is that incentives reduce costs for ‘producers’ (or stewards) of ecosystem services and prescribe more realistic values to ecosystem services, costs which, in theory, are borne by consumers (Engel et al. 2008).

A social trap is a situation where the short-term benefits of a decision are at odds with long-term optimal outcome (Cross and Guyer 1980). Some poverty traps are social traps. For example, rampant clear-cut deforestation may have short-term payoffs but is, in many cases a long-term net loss for both the agents of deforestation and wider society. With regard to socio-ecological systems, these traps may be spatial as well as temporal – where the actions of some in one locale may adversely affect others elsewhere (economists call these externalities). In a world of rapidly changing environmental quality, our inability to solve social traps across time and space affects the immediate welfare of millions of people living at the margin, as well as the long-term welfare of society and wildlife populations writ large.

Interest in ecosystem services and the development of financial mechanisms to incentivize their protection have rapidly expanded over the past decade. The notion of ecosystem services and their value was described by (Daily 1997) with the publication of the book “Nature’s Services,” which highlighted the notion that ecosystems provide human society with a variety of important needs. The valuation of these services was brought to light by (Costanza et al. 1997) who estimated that ecosystems provide humanity with $33 trillion dollars per year in services, which was higher than global Gross National Product, $18 trillion dollars, when the analysis was conducted. The notion of ecosystem services was further popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005) that identified four classes of services: provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting. In reality, the public and private interest in ecosystem services has surpassed our ecological knowledge regarding how ecosystems and biological communities interact to provide these services (Daily, personal communication). As ecosystem services continue to gain in popularity and in demand, it is critical that ecologists and economists continue to collaborate in understanding how to correctly value the provisioning of services, and how to ensure that the service purchased by the buyer is provided by the landowner.

As all of the chapters throughout this volume have discussed, increasing amounts of pressure have been exerted on natural resources by a wide variety of user groups. In the absence of effective governance institutions implemented at the appropriate ecological scale, natural resources and the environment are in peril from these increasing pressures (Dietz et al. 2003). As Ostrom (2009) outlines, resource collapse is more likely in large, highly valuable, open-access systems when the resource harvesters are diverse, do not communicate, and fail to develop rules and norms for managing the resource. Establishing effective institutions and processes for managing multiple resources in such situations is often a highly complex undertaking (Wilkie et al. 2008). For example, many globally valuable natural resources, including a wide variety of flora and fauna species, fisheries, minerals, fossil fuels, timber and water are also connected to ecosystem components or functions that are critical for rural livelihoods. Managing multiple, simultaneous, and often interacting endogenous and exogenous demands on these resources can be especially challenging when tenure or resource rights are non-existent or unclear; governance structures to enforce rights or ensure equity in natural resource decision making are weak or non-existent; and/or when the extent of a resource or system transcends state or national boundaries as is often the case with fisheries or river basins, for example. This section is concerned with how some of these management challenges manifest themselves, the implications for ecosystem integrity and poverty reduction, and some of the solutions that have arisen for managing those challenges.

Wild-caught fisheries and aquaculture constitute a critical sector for fishing communities and developing coastal economies throughout the world. They contribute a nominal value of $170 billion to the global economy, while supporting the livelihoods of an estimated 520 million people (FAO 2008). While a significant portion of the value of production is through large-scale or high-value stocks such as tuna, shrimp, and anchovy, demographically, 90% of all fishermen work at a small scale and live in developing countries (McClanahan et al. 2008; World Bank 2008). At the household level, fisheries provide not only significant employment income but also critical food security as the main source of protein for numerous small island states and coastal countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, French Guiana, the Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone (FAO 2008). On a national scale, fishery contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ranges from around 0.5% to 2.5%, but may be as much as 7% in some coastal countries, such as Senegal, and upwards of 20% on small Pacific islands (Zeller et al. 2007).

Participatory zoning projects promise to balance conservation and development at a landscape scale, but such efforts face serious political and institutional challenges. Case studies from Bolivia, Philippines and Peru reveal that governance, funding commitments, ecological context, and the use of innovative mapping techniques can stall or advance zoning outcomes.

The practice of setting lands aside for the preservation of natural and cultural heritage, sometimes in the face of a perceived threat to that site or resource, is hardly a modern concept. For centuries, even millennia, human societies have established protected areas, often for the safeguarding of sacred sites, forests, or hunting grounds (Chape et al. 2005). Most mark the beginning of our present-day network of government-established protected areas with the declaration of the first national park, Yellowstone, by the U.S. federal government in 1872. The early protected areas of the U.S. system embodied the romantic concept of wilderness, one captured in the writings and actions of Thoreau, Muir, and others as the sublime: natural landscapes where one might best sense the presence of God (Cronon 1995). This wilderness concept propelled a pre­servationist mode of protected area creation and management, one that focused on protected areas as natural monuments, places that should be kept free of human activity. By the second half of the twentieth century, the primary motivations behind conservation and protected area establishment shifted from the wilderness and preservationist ethic to one focused on conservation of rapidly disappearing habitats, often in landscapes where the spheres of human societies and nature were interwoven (McNeely 2005). Today, protected areas (PAs) are often cited as the cornerstones of biodiversity conservation, the most effective tool for in-situ conservation, as well as essential safeguards of ecosystem services (CBD 2006; MEA 2005).

If a development strategy is ecologically sound, meaning that it is founded on ecological principles and is environmentally sustainable, then it qualifies as sustainable development, but qualifying as such makes no guarantees about whether it will or will not promote poverty reduction. There are, of course, different definitions of sustainable development, but a universal requirement for any development program to be sustainable is that its activities that are designed to meet the needs of the present generation will not jeopardize the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This requirement is akin to long-term (i.e., multigenerational) ecological stability where the water, nutrient, and energy needs of millions of species, on a global scale, are met generation after generation for tens to thousands of years. Because ecological systems appear globally to exhibit slow dynamics (Fig. 19.1), it makes sense that ecology is a science to which we might turn for understanding how to achieve environmental sustainability. To put it into an ecological perspective, consider Fig. 19.1, which compares the Holocene, the last 12 × 10³ years, to what some call the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewcz et al. 2008; Steffen et al. 2009), which covers roughly (although, the starting date is debated) the last three centuries (more than that if the starting point is with the commencement of agriculture 10,000 years ago).