Macroeconomics: Poverty & The Environment

Breaking the linkages between rural poverty and environmental degradation

It is in many of the most biologically rich and vulnerable places that a vast majority of the world's poor - the rural poor - live. Indeed, their survival often depends on the quality and availability of natural resources. However, efforts by governments, development agencies and the private sector to reduce and eventually eradicate poverty, primarily through economic growth, often ignore the reliance of the poor on the environment.

At the same time, conservation organizations often fail to understand and address the role of the environment in the lives of the rural poor, as well as the central role the rural poor must play in conserving the ecosystem.

It is this disconnect between development and conservation that WWF's Poverty and Environment Program seeks to mend. The Program works to ensure a central role for environmental issues in national growth policies and poverty reduction programs, while demonstrating, to conservation organizations, the essential importance of addressing the issue of poverty.

The Program operates at multiple levels - national, sub-national and local - developing and implementing strategic interventions based on an understanding of how national economic and institutional factors shape local-level actions and behavior. Interventions include changing national laws and policies, reforming resource management institutions at the sub-national level, and increasing access of the poor to natural resources at the local level.

Each of the 4 projects that make up the Poverty and Environment Program represents a different approach to promoting conservation-based strategies for alleviating poverty:

• Economic Change, Poverty and the Environment
• Promoting the Role of Ecosystem Services in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
• Streamlining Poverty-Environment Linkages in the European Community's Development Assistance
• Poverty Reduction through Improved Natural Resources Management