IX. CONSERVATION & DEVELOPMENT / POVERTY ALLEVIATION

Published studies on conservation and development, sustainable development, and ecosystem services, with notes (by Rachel Neugarten).  Some studies are copyright protected so you must be a member of this workspace (and logged in) in order to download them.

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Agrawal, Arun, and Kent Redford. 2006.  Poverty, Development, And Biodiversity Conservation: Shooting in the Dark? WCS Working Paper. Bronx, NY: Wildlife Conservation Society. http://www.wcs.org/media/file/wcswp26.pdf.

• reviewed 37 case studies of projects striving to both conserve biodiversity & alleviate poverty
• difficult to generalize from context-specific case studies
• concepts of "poverty" and "biodiversity" tended to be oversimplified (only economic and political dimensions of poverty considered, not health/educational/cultural, for example, and only presence/absence of certain species groups were considered as biodiversity)
• different measures of poverty and biodiversity in each study means you cannot compare results
• only 2 out of 47 (37?) case studies were comparative (Salafsky 1993 was one)
• recommend greater attention to causal relationships between factors, mechanisms that explain outcomes
• "new studies need to focus on the dynamics of the relationship between various measures of poverty and bio­diversity, and on how these dynamics are affected by macro-social and political variables such as education, demographic change, levels of unemployment, and technological change among others"
• "Better research design, based on careful specification of the relevant hypotheses, will likely require panel data from a suite of sites and households to allow systematic comparison across cases and regions."

Goldman, Rebecca L., Heather Tallis, Peter Kareiva, and Gretchen C. Daily. 2008.  Field evidence that ecosystem service projects support biodiversity and diversify options.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 27 (June 30, 2008): 9445-9448.

Tallis, Heather, Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Amy Chang.  An ecosystem services framework to support both practical conservation and economic development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, no. 28 (July 15, 2008): 9457-64. doi:10.1073/pnas.0705797105.

• analyzed World Bank projects with objectives of alleviating poverty and protecting biodiversity
• total projects = 11,155, but surveyed projects that listed biodiversity as a theme, had Implementation Completion Reports (1998-2006), and stated environmental and poverty alleviation goals and outcomes (n = 32)
• only 5 out of 32 (16%) had substantial gains in both environmental and poverty alleviation outcomes
• "This melding of conservation and development comes from two distinct agendas: conservationists who seek to increase public support for biodiversity protection by integrating economic development, and development agencies that seek to also provide for the stewardship of nature under the mantra of sustainable development"
• recommendation: "develop a framework for assessing the connections between ecosystem services and economic development on a project-by-project basis and suggest indicators and metrics that could increase the likelihood of win-win outcomes"
• "The natural science, social science, and practitioner communities jointly need to establish a standard set of measures and approaches for quantifying and monitoring ecosystem service levels and values."