Extinction.

This paper introduces a special feature on biodiversity conservation and poverty traps. We define and explain the core concepts and then identify four distinct classes of mechanisms that define important interlinkages between biodiversity and poverty. The multiplicity of candidate mechanisms underscores a major challenge in designing policy appropriate across settings. This framework is then used to introduce the ensuing set of papers, which empirically explore these various mechanisms linking poverty traps and biodiversity conservation.

Stemming biodiversity loss and reducing poverty are global challenges of the first order, enshrined in both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Millennium Development Goals, agreed by virtually all countries over the past decade. The world is nonetheless struggling to meet the ambitions expressed in those global accords. The World Wide Fund for Nature International finds that the earth’s wildlife populations have declined by a third over the past 35 years alone but by even more, 60%, in poorer tropical regions (). The rate and magnitude of these losses will define the earth’s sixth mass extinction period unless we quickly reverse this decline (). Meanwhile, leaving aside the remarkable case of China, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased by more than 30% from 1981 to 2004 and now surpasses 1 billion ().

The persistence of extreme poverty and continued rapid loss of biodiversity appear intimately related. Extreme poverty and biodiversity hot spots are geographically coincident, concentrated in rural areas where livelihoods depend disproportionately on natural capital embodied in forests, rangelands, soils, water, and wildlife. Colocation naturally gives rise to closely coupled human-managed ecosystems that are in a precarious balance at best. Lack of resources, institutions, and governance structures often leaves local people ill-equipped to institute mechanisms to ensure long-term resource maintenance. Compounding this problem, the conditions of the human and nonhuman species within ecosystems coevolve in response to subtle shifts in any of several subsystems.

Despite the importance of this coevolutionary relationship, connections between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation remain remarkably underexplored, not only in formal theorizing but especially empirically. We have surprisingly little observational or experimental detail describing interactions in closely coupled human and natural systems in the rural tropics. In the absence of rigorous evidence on the synergies or tradeoffs between biodiversity conservation and 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 (). Similarly, those implementing economic development interventions often cannot foresee environmental sequelae, whether direct or triggered by changes in human behavior in response to an intervention. Poverty researchers 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 human and natural processes, perhaps especially in smallholder agrarian systems ). Few efforts to achieve “win-win” solutions (e.g., bioprospecting, ecotourism, integrated conservation and development projects, payments for ecosystem services) have fully delivered on their promises. In addition, few studies carefully assess both the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of such efforts. There is scant empirical evidence that could support or refute the hypotheses underlying these approaches, or could provide a basis for modeling of the interrelationship between biodiversity conservation and poverty traps in areas of endemic poverty.

This special feature explores these connections, particularly marshaling empirical evidence from a range of poor areas and at different scales of analysis to begin to assemble a solid evidence base that can be used as a foundation for conservation and poverty reduction efforts moving forward. We seek more than mere statistical associations; we want to push toward a firmer grasp of causal mechanisms to guide interventions aimed at conserving nature, at helping people escape poverty, or both. Several serious challenges are broadly noteworthy for studies associating biophysical and social aspects of conservation and poverty: the absence of landscape-scale matched controls, the absence of sufficient baseline or historical data in both disciplines, and the general absence of credible counterfactual analysis. The research papers assembled in this special feature do not conclusively surmount all these challenges, but they improve our empirical understanding of the complex connections between biodiversity conservation and poverty traps, and describe new approaches to tackling these interrelated global problems.