Poverty Reduction & The Environment
Degraded environments are a constraint to development and hinder attempts at poverty alleviation. Ecosystem goods and services, when taken into account, can improve poverty reduction efforts.
Nature has always been a route to wealth, at least for a few. Profit from systematically harvesting timber and fish stocks, from converting grasslands to farm fields, and from the exploit of oil, gas, and mineral reserves has created personal fortunes, inspired stock markets, and powered the economic development of nations for centuries. This scale of natural resource wealth has been amassed mostly through unsustainable means, and the benefits have largely accrued to the powerful. For it is the powerful who generally control resource access at larger scales through land ownership or logging, fishing, or mining concessions; who command the capital to make investments; and who can negotiate the government regulatory regimes that control the use of natural resources. The poor, by contrast, have reaped little of the total wealth extracted from nature.
Even though they do not currently capture most of the wealth created by ecosystems, the livelihoods of the poor are built around these natural resources. Maximizing environmental income involves not only improved resource management, but creation of new markets for nontraditional or underexploited products. Often, it requires greater attention to marketing traditional products such as fish, so that more of the revenue generated is captured by the fishers themselves in the form of higher prices for their harvests. Making ecosystems work as an economic asset for the poor should be seen not as an isolated goal, but part of a larger strategy for rural development. Utilizing the natural assets of the poor is not a “silver bullet” for poverty reduction that can single-handedly bring wealth to families living in poverty. It is rather part of a general transition of rural economies from subsistence to wealth accumulation, working first to support a more profitable small-scale agriculture and natural resource economy -- the current mainstays of rural livelihoods -- that eventually will provide the foundations for building a complementary rural industrial and service economy.
