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)

This paper in press at Conservation Letters by Haines et al. presents a novel method for assessing conservation actions. There’s been quite a bit of work done in the past decade, particularly by NGOs, to develop methods to assess whether their actions have actually succeeded; this work was spear-headed in particular by Nick Salafsky and his Foundations of Success. This paper suggests that many of conservation biggest problems can be monitored with spatial datasets and proposes using the Human Footprint as a basis for such monitoring. The Human Footprint is, in essence, a collection of spatial datasets that holistically represent the collective anthropogenic impact on the land. In their paper, Haines et al. suggest that by tracking these spatial datasets through time in a paired way — conservation action site randomly paired with a control — we can get a better handle on whether the particular action was successful. The nice thing about the paper is how clear-eyed it is about what is and is not possible using this approach:

The human footprint is a spatially explicit approach to conservation planning that may serve as an effective visual medium to public audiences and stakeholders worldwide by simplifying the presentation of complex information.

(This is always the last, best resort for spatial analysts: even if the model isn’t perfect, it’s a great communication tool. ) But they also warn:

Spatial data rarely produce a complete picture of what negative impacts are occurring because human footprint data are not well-suited to track anthropogenic impacts that lack a spatial signature…[e.g.] the spread of some chemical pollutants, invasive species, diseases, and impacts of poaching…

Although I have to disagree partially with these particulars — presence of roads is often a very good correlative of poaching — their main point is an important one to consider. How well does a spatial model of human influence catch these hidden factors? A few years ago I did an informal (and sadly never completed) analysis of invasive plants and the Human Footprint and found that they were actually fairly well correlated. You could also argue that disease may be higher amongst individuals that are negatively impacted by the presence of humans. There’s plenty of opportunity here for further exploration.

Haines, A. et al. A theoretical approach to using human footprint data to assess landscape level conservation efforts. Conservation Letters, in press. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00024.x)