Poverty and biodiversity: Measuring the overlap of human poverty and the biodiversity hotspots

Abstract

In an effort to prioritize conservation efforts, scientists have developed the concept of biodiversity hotspots. Since most hotspots occur in countries where poverty is widespread, the success of conservation efforts depends upon the recognition that poverty can be a significant constraint on conservation, and at the same time conservation is an important component to the alleviation of long-term poverty. In this paper we present five key socio-economic poverty indicators (access to water, undernourishment, potential population pressure, number living below poverty line and debt service) and integrate them with an ecologically based hotspots analysis in order to illustrate magnitude of the overlap between biological conservation and poverty. The analysis here suggests that the overlap between severe, multifaceted poverty and key areas of global biodiversity is great and needs to be acknowledged. Understanding the magnitude of overlap and interactions among poverty, conservation and macroeconomic processes is crucial for identifying illusive, yet possible, win–win solutions.

Introduction

The need for an interdisciplinary approach to science has become obvious in recent years and is perhaps most pertinent in the fields of conservation and sustainable development. Due to the linkages between socio-economic systems and ecological systems, issues such as development, poverty eradication, and biodiversity conservation need to be addressed not as individual phenomena but rather as complex dynamic systems. Addressing these systems will require input from social and natural scientists, as well as policy makers and practitioners (Sanderson, 2005). In this paper we address the interconnectivity of global biodiversity conservation priorities with human poverty issues. These issues represent key areas of focus for major global initiatives such as the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Make Poverty History campaign.

The starting point for this analysis is the 2000 Nature article by Myers et al. entitled “Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities”. In this landmark paper, Myers et al. developed a strategy for prioritizing areas of biodiversity by providing a ranking of hotspots in order to assist planners in the face of insufficient funding. The authors focused their analysis on and defined ‘hotspots’ as areas having “exceptional concentrations of endemic species and experiencing exceptional loss of habitat”. They defined 25 original hotspots, but this list was recently expanded to 34 hotspots and has become the major focus of Conservation International's (CI) work. By focusing on these hotspots, the authors estimate it may be possible to protect 44% of all vascular plant species and 35% of 4 major vertebrate group in only 1.4% of the earth's surface (Myers et al., 2000). This was, and continues to be, an important and timely effort due to the growing evidence of human driven ecosystem degradation and species loss (Vitousek, 1997). While an excellent endeavor to help prioritize funding for conservation, their paper does not address the fact that the success of conservation initiatives is largely dependent on the socio-economic conditions of the areas where these hotspots occur.

Adams et al. (2004) recently reviewed the controversy surrounding the link between biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. In their article they developed a typology for this relationship, which spanned the range of opinions. The four categories they developed are:

• Poverty and conservation are separate policy realms.

• Poverty is a constraint on conservation.

• Conservation should not compromise poverty reduction.

• Poverty reduction depends on living resource conservation.

These categories do not preclude the necessity of both poverty alleviation and conservation, but rather express different viewpoints (or prioritizations) of these complex systems. The Myers et al. (2000) endeavor was excellent for identifying hotspots, but it is a category 1 strategy of maintaining the separation between conservation priorities and poverty alleviation. While conservation and poverty data have seldom been fully integrated (Snel, 2004), Cincotta et al. (2000) have expanded the analysis of hotspots by including the interactions with population densities and growth rates. Smith et al. (2003) have examined governance corruption with respect to hotspots. There have also been several attempts at integrating socio-economic data into conservation prioritization in an effort to move away from this category 1 framework (Sisk et al., 1994, Balmford et al., 2003, Veech, 2003, O'connor et al., 2003). These papers all base their priority setting on conservation costs and threats, and their analysis would generally fall in Adams et al.'s categories 2–3.

While the socio-economic indicators we use could support viewpoints in categories 2–4, the function of this paper is to provide analysis for practitioners to show the geographic overlap of key areas for both poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. This analysis could be useful to any of the typology viewpoints, but the discussion that follows the analysis focuses primarily on the category four viewpoint, which is becoming increasingly common in the literature.

Previous attempts are laudable calls to the conservation community to prioritize initiatives based on possible success in light of socio-economic conditions. Our work on the other hand uses vital poverty statistics, such as access to clean water, food scarcity and national debt service, in acknowledgment of the fact that organizations working on poverty issues face critical constraints but continue to work on literally life and death issues. In doing this, we move beyond conservation prioritization, and point to the large scale at which poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation concerns overlap. We highlight the innate linkages between conservation and poverty by assessing socio-economic poverty indicators that have an impact on, and feedback into, conservation. We also provide a ranking of the critical hotspots and countries based on these indicators. This work recognizes the fact that conservation in general does not automatically translate to protection of high levels of biodiversity, but the linkage between these two is in recognition of the strong and well documented link that ecosystem destruction leads to species loss (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1981, Tilman et al., 1994, Czech et al., 2000).