Incorporating basic needs to reconcile poverty and ecosystem services.

Björn Schulte‐Herbrüggen,Tim M. Daw,Sarah Coulthard,Katrina Brown,Tomas Chaigneau

doi:10.1111/cobi.13209

Abstract

Conservation managers frequently face the challenge of protecting and sustaining biodiversity without producing detrimental outcomes for (often poor) human populations that depend on ecosystem services for their well‐being. However, mutually beneficial solutions are often elusive and can mask trade‐offs and negative outcomes for people. To deal with such trade‐offs, ecological and social thresholds need to be identified to determine the acceptable solution space for conservation. Although human well‐being as a concept has recently gained prominence, conservationists still lack tools to evaluate how their actions affect it in a given context. We applied the theory of human needs to conservation by building on an extensive historical application of need approaches in international development. In an innovative participatory method that included focus groups and household surveys, we evaluated how human needs are met based on locally relevant thresholds. We then established connections between human needs and ecosystem services through key‐informant focus groups. We applied our method in coastal East Africa to identify households that would not be able to meet their basic needs and to uncover the role of ecosystem services in meeting these. This enabled us to identify how benefits derived from the environment were contributing to meeting basic needs and to consider potential repercussions that could arise through changes to ecosystem service provision. We suggest our approach can help conservationists and planners balance poverty alleviation and biodiversity protection and ensure conservation measures do not, at the very least, cause serious harm to individuals. We further argue it can be used as a basis for monitoring the impacts of conservation on multidimensional poverty.

Highlights

Poverty and biodiversity loss are two of the world’s most critical challenges
The theory of human need is one of many approaches in terms of conceptualising poverty and measuring poverty thresholds (Alkire 2002; Tsui 2002), but we argue that its universality and tangibility make it a rich operational framework for addressing hard choices between nature conservation and poverty alleviation goals (Gough 2014; O’Neill et al 2018) and a basis for monitoring and mitigating conservation impacts on multidimensional poverty
The data were collected as part of a larger project working to establish how marine ecosystem services contributed to human wellbeing and poverty alleviation in coastal communities in Kenya and northern Mozambique

Summary

Introduction

Poverty and biodiversity loss are two of the world’s most critical challenges. It is widely accepted that these are linked problems which frequently coincide at various scales (Turner et al 2012) and that they should be tackled together (Adams et al 2004). Achieving this involves a difficult balancing act between two competing, and often conflicting, objectives – improving people’s lives through natural resource access and consumption, whilst ensuring ecological health and sustainability of biodiversity in the face of growing populations and pressures on resources It has proved a challenge for conservation, and in practice steering the contribution of ecosystem services towards greater poverty alleviation is riddled with difficulty and limited success – with many potential ‘benefits’ failing to reach the poorest people and being captured instead by wealthier and more powerfully positioned ‘elite’ groups (Thompson & Homewood 2002). The post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals for example, signals the re-emergence of ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’ as part of an integrated set of global ambitions (Griggs et al 2013)

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Conclusion