On February 4-5, 2010, the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and the new Cornell Center for Wildlife Conservation will co-host a workshop at Cornell University on "Biodiversity Conservation and Poverty Traps". This event, which will be held at Cornell's Baker Institute for Animal Health, will bring together a small, select group of social and biological scientists who are explicitly exploring some of the unique challenges associated with biodiversity conservation in areas characterized by widespread chronic poverty or with poverty reduction in areas rich in biodiversity. The objective of this workshop is to explore the connections between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation with greater rigor, to marshal empirical evidence from a range of poor areas so as to begin to assemble a solid evidence base on which to base biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction efforts moving forward.
The connections between biodiversity conservation and poverty traps are many. Global concentrations of extreme poverty and biodiversity hot spots are geographically coincident, and models of poverty traps and of ecosystem resilience have qualitatively similar structures (Carpenter and Brock 2008). But the connections between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation remain remarkably underexplored; empirical evidence on the various important links between them are especially scarce. This workshop marshals evidence from across the biological and social sciences and around the world on the substantive empirical linkages between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation with the objective of demonstrating both how the study of each phenomena can be enhanced through incorporation of the other and how the design of interventions in each area might thereby be improved.
In the absence of rigorous empirical evidence on the synergies or tradeoffs between biodiversity conservation and the escape from poverty traps, opinion and untested hypotheses predominate and crucial linkages are too often overlooked. Conservationists typically ignore the predictable consequences of human agency; people adapt behaviors in response to changes in environmental management, often generating unintended consequences that undermine conservation objectives (Barrett and Arcese 1998). Similarly, those studying poverty are only beginning to grasp the importance of understanding the dynamics of the ecosystems on which many livelihoods and technologies depend, and the feedback between the human and natural processes, perhaps especially in smallholder agrarian systems (Barrett 2008). Many designs have been employed to try to achieve "win-win" solutions \u2013 e.g., bioprospecting, ecotourism, integrated conservation and development projects, and payments for ecosystem services. However, few studies carefully assess both the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of such designs. Systemic empirical evidence supporting or refuting the underlying hypotheses of these approaches and field-based modeling of the interrelationship between biodiversity conservation and poverty traps remain thin./p>
This is somewhat surprising because theorists working in both areas use similar frameworks, commonly employing models characterized by multiple equilibria in which different initial conditions lead to qualitatively different dynamics converging on different steady states. Systems characterized by multiple equilibria can be locally stable (or "resilient") but prone to sudden shifts in their dynamics at critical thresholds (or "tipping points" or "unstable equilibria"). Such systems pique the interest of scholars in both disciplines. At least since the seminal work of Holling (1973), May (1977) and Hanski et al. (1995), environmental scientists have worked tirelessly at identifying and understanding thresholds in ecological systems in order that they might help resource managers avoid catastrophic collapse of biodiversity in key ecosystems. Meanwhile social scientists' interest focuses more on the reverse process, on understanding why some people, communities and even entire nations remain mired in grinding poverty while others have enjoyed rapid improvements in standards of living, i.e., how to move social systems from low- to high-level equilibria. These conceptual and analytical similarities should facilitate linking the study of poverty traps and of biodiversity conservation. To date, however, that has not really happened. We hope this workshop can spark more explicit interactions among poverty trap and biodiversity conservation researchers.
References
Barrett, C.B., 2008. Poverty Traps and Resource Dynamics In Smallholder Agrarian Systems, in A. Ruis and R. Dellink, eds., Economics of poverty, the environment and natural resource use Dordrecht: Springer.
Barrett, C.B., and Arcese, P., 1998. Wildlife harvest in integrated conservation and development projects: linking harvest to household demand, agricultural production and environmental shocks in the Serengeti. Land Economics, 74: 449-65.
Carpenter, S.R. & Brock, W.A., 2008. "Adaptive Capacity and Traps", Ecology and Society 13(2):40.
Hanski, I., Poyry, J., Pakkala, T., and Kuussaari, M., 1995. Multiple equilibria in metapopulation dynamics. Nature, 377: 618-621.
Holling, C.S., 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 4:1-23.
May, R.M., 1977. Thresholds and breakpoints in ecosystems with a multiplicity of stable states. Nature, 269: 471-477.