Exploring the linkages between poverty and biodiversity

Biodiversity supports livelihoods of the rural poor in a number of ways, providing scope for building bridges between the conservation and development community to achieve win-win outcomes. A growing interest in this area amongst CCI partners stimulated a Shared Challenges workshop in March 2012 which provided an ideal opportunity to share perspectives and to discuss further opportunities for collaborative work.

Recent work in the UK and internationally has focused on assessing the strength of the evidence for biodiversity-poverty linkages and mainstreaming the evidence into development and planning policies. This workshop focused on conservation outcomes, and discussed what we need to understand about the linkages between biodiversity and poverty in order to improve those outcomes. In a facilitated discussion session, participants considered how their work helps inform and/or answer this question, and think about ways in which the evidence base could be improved through collaboration amongst CCI partners.

Project Aims

The aim of this workshop was to provide a forum for conservation and development researchers/practitioners to meet and discuss recent and planned work within the field of conservation and poverty interactions.

Key Activities

• CCI Workshop: ‘Exploring the linkages between poverty and biodiversity’ (3rd March 2012) Eighteen people from 7 CCI partner organisations and departments came together for a workshop at Corpus Christ College, Cambridge.

Conservation Impact

Broad participation in the workshop together with a growing number of collaborative projects that link poverty, development and conservation shows that there is a strong, and growing, interest in this area within the CCI academic and practitioner community. Further opportunities for collaborative work and ways to strengthen this network will therefore be explored in the future.

• CCI-catalyzed-project-1-LINKING-POVERTY-AND-BIODIVERSITY-Factsheet-22nd-Nov-2012.pdf (PDF, 600.46 Kb)

Outputs

1. A workshop report, outlining the agenda and speakers at the workshop on the 3rd March 2012.