This month, Oryx has a number of articles on the role of conservation in poverty alleviation, including a review of their intertwining history by Dilys Roe, “a Senior Researcher in the the International Institute for Environment and Development’s Natural Resources Group, specialising in biodiversity.” There’s also a paper by Kent Redford et al. that looks specifically at where poverty and biodiversity intersect by using a spatially-explicit dataset from CIESIN of infant mortality rates and the Human Footprint. They find that a disproprtionate percentage of the world’s poor live in places most transformed by humans. Redford and his colleagues at WCS (continue to) suggest that while conservation and poverty alleviation can work hand in hand, there are plenty of other NGOs tasked specifically dealing with the latter, and that conservation organizations should be focused on conserving biodiversity first and foremost. I’ll leave the eloquence to them:

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 (< 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. Many of the policy pronouncements linking poverty alleviation and conservation currently being proposed do not recognize this fact.

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.

Which is to say: if conservation organizations could show that it was possible to protect biodiverse areas while lifting the people living there out of poverty, wouldn’t that just be a great way to show the world that conservation was super cool and worthy of greater effort and resources?

Dilys Roe. The origins and evolution of the conservation-poverty debate: a review of key literature, events and policy processes. Oryx, 42:391-503. (doi: 10.1017/S0030605308002032)

Redford, K. et al. What is the role for conservation organizations in poverty alleviation in the world’s wild places? Oryx, 42:516-528. (doi: 10.1017/S0030605308001889)