Biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction are central issues in sustainability science (Kates et al. 2001, Wu 2006), and have been enumerated as specific objectives in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Unfortunately, rapid progress in global economy and technology has not significantly attenuated the dramatic rates of biodiversity loss and world poverty. Biodiversity experts estimate that the current rate of species extinction is 100–1000 times greater than the prehuman natural rate (Lawton and May 1995). Additionally, as of 2005, over 1.4 billion people across the world were living in conditions of extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than US$1.25 per day (Chen and Ravallion 2008). There exists a salient geographic overlap between the existence of severe poverty and hotspots of biodiversity (Fisher and Christopher 2007). While conservation objectives do not necessarily infringe upon development goals, it does not mean “win–win” outcomes are easy to achieve (Kareiva et al. 2008). Contemporary socio-ecological problems are multidimensional and range across varying geographic scales. In this paper I advocate a microfinance approach that provides local people with basic financial services (e.g., credit and insurance) and basic economic education to promote sustainable development in areas where high biodiversity and poverty coexist. Microfinance has succeeded in improving the welfare of millions of impoverished people across the world. In rural landscapes, microfinance can enhance the economic infrastructure of local communities and increase the efficacy of conservation policy. Further, it may also improve the resolution of ecosystem service valuation and allow better multi-scale analysis of socio-ecological landscapes. Commercial markets often fail to take into account the economic value of ecosystem services (Costanza et al. 1997, Costanza 2001). As a result, little emphasis is placed on the importance of natural resources in economic development. The social and environmental failures of these technocratic “top down” regimes of resource management are especially prominent in developing countries, where local people engage in severe environmental degradation for meager returns in income. Examples of this behavior include ecologically deleterious farming practices, and the poaching of endangered species. Environmental conservation efforts, on the other hand, have often taken a “bottom up” approach focused on cordoning off protected spaces for strict preservation. Perspectives differ on what constitutes a more desirable “middle ground” of biodiversity conservation and economic development. Achieving sustainable outcomes in both, however, is not only desired but also necessary (Kates et al. 2001, Wu 2006). To properly account for the value of nature in economic decision-making, a number of interdisciplinary fields have emerged. Approaches of ecosystem valuation have sought to derive tenable economic values for natural resources so they can be sustainably managed. Despite the significant progress that has been made in this regard, there are still failures and lack of valuation for many ecosystem services, especially as the degree of human impact on the environment continues to increase (Balmford et al. 2002). Examples of other aspects of ecosystem services valuation that may prove to be problematic include: The scope of hedonic pricing is limited to environmental benefits related to housing prices. Real estate markets, as they can be understood and codified in modern economic analysis, are virtually nonexistent in the rural landscapes of developing countries. Contingent valuation is reliant upon adequate response rates to surveys and predicated under the assumption of sufficient knowledge (nuanced human capital) in respondents. This is a wistful proposition when dealing with rural communities in developing countries. In fact, information asymmetry is a principal characteristic of socio-ecological imbalance in these regions. Many of the obstacles to achieving win–win scenarios of development and conservation are a result of the strict preservationist approach to biodiversity protection in regions of strident poverty. In such approaches, land is cordoned off as inviolable habitats and denied all other land-use options (Norton-Griffiths and Southey 1995). These policies can result in significant costs for local communities that have long been dependent on these natural resources. The idea of biodiversity reserves as islands isolated from human development is neither scientifically nor pragmatically sound (Rosenzweig 2003, Adams et al. 2004). Unlike developed countries such as the United States, which are, in generalized dimensions, on the downslope of the Environmental Kuznet's Curve, most developing countries do not yet have the economic latitude to accommodate the lost opportunity costs of strict land preservation. Scientists and policymakers have often struggled to properly redress the negative economic impacts of conservation on adjacent communities, and many of the costs of biodiversity protection in developing countries are borne by local people (Roe and Elliott 2004). Instead, striking an appropriate balance between development and conservation should entail the promotion of a more integrated socio-ecological landscape contingent upon holistic criteria of sustainability. Emphasis should be placed on integration as opposed to segregation, the efficient use of natural resources as opposed to prohibitive non-use policies, and the idea of the local community as being an integral constituent of the sustainable landscape as opposed to being an intrusion upon it. For example, community-based natural resource management scenarios in southern Africa have yielded both ecological and economic gains, enhancing the income of local peoples while increasing native biodiversity (Getz et al. 1999). When there are adequate knowledge and an appropriate institutional and economic framework, communities have demonstrated the capacity to manage natural resources sustainably over the long term (Pretty 2003). However, local communities in developing countries (many of which have some of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world) are not generally furnished with the aforementioned provisions. As a result, a dearth of social capital, tremendous environmental degradation, and low levels of incomes coexist. Thus, new community-oriented approaches aimed at integrating the local community as a sustainable economic agent with the natural landscape is important. Unfortunately, such integrative landscape approaches are yet to be applied worldwide (Wu 2006, Naveh 2007). Generalized prescriptions to ameliorate socio-ecological imbalance are problematic to specific situations on fine scales. Different communities exert distinctive ecological and economic demands, and different landscapes boost different kinds of natural resources with varying abundances. Environmental systems are complex, and biodiversity levels may vary significantly with scale (Willis and Whittaker 2002). A multiscale approach is integral to considering the consequences of decision-making on ecosystem services and resultant human well-being (Ranganathan et al. 2008). Well-designed community-oriented initiatives can address the problems specific to the community and the surrounding landscape. Scientists have the ability to endow local communities with technological capacity and better information, but must hew to the knowledge and opinion of the local people to address relevant needs (Getz et al. 1999). Broader scale, “top down” assessments of environmental problems may be insensitive to local conditions and obstacles, and thus result in erroneous conclusions (Ranganathan et al. 2008). There is no panacea to solve every environmental poverty problem. Win–win scenarios have been achieved on local scales (Getz et al. 1999, Adams et al. 2004), but the greater challenge will be to create solutions on broader geographic levels. While the spatial extrapolation of biophysical observations has been extensively studied in the past decades (Wu 2007), the same cannot be said for socioeconomic patterns and processes. To effectively address combined biodiversity conservation and economic development on broad scales, it is important to view the community as an active economic component of a landscape mosaic of multiple socio-ecological interactive units (allocating natural resources and reacting to external pressures). These heterogeneous landscapes can be viewed as having shared socio-ecological principles on a broad level, but more specific demands and properties on a local level (including, perhaps most prominently, properties stemming from culture and customs). To develop a holistic framework for assessing the functionality of socio-ecological landscapes at both local and broad scales, a robust economic profile of the given landscape must be available. A fundamental problem when considering the integrated landscape as an economic unit is the high degree of non-monetized natural resource use. There is a lack of knowledge regarding trends of human reliance on ecosystem services, including quotidian resources such as fuel wood and fodder (Carpenter et al. 2006). Basic transactions and resource use at the community level need to be given economic profiles. Microscale economic development (instruments of credit, insurance, and education) can create, in at least a rudimentary way, a framework of accountability even in the most rural communities. Additionally, with better accountability at the local scale, more accurate extrapolations can be made at higher scales. The rural poor, those who practice shift farming and poaching, and whose population numbers in the hundreds of millions across fragile landscapes, occupy marginal positions in the socio-economic framework. They have little in the way of credit, insurance, or the means and knowledge to implement new technology. On the other hand, their ecological presence is imposing. Communities living at the fringe of the market economy loom large over ecosystems that they directly impact through nonmonetized activities—activities they cannot be held accountable for because the major costs of their transactions (e.g., biodiversity loss) are not factors in economic analysis. As information asymmetry persists, negative feedback cycles between environmental degradation and diminishing returns in income manifest themselves. While not without its shortcomings, microfinance has a demonstrated success in elevating the incomes, and sharpening the economic profiles, of impoverished communities. Through the provision of basic financial services, microfinance institutions (MFIs), such as Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank, have benefited millions in low-income countries. Many ecosystem services are essentially common goods, making them extremely susceptible to shortsighted, nonsustainable usage. Institutional measures, such as trusts, could allow better coordination of common property rights (Costanza 2007), and the availability of credit, even modest amounts, can expand the capability of rural communities to invest in more sustainable technologies and methods. Additionally, access to insurance can lower the vulnerability of these communities to economic and ecological shocks. This greater capacity for risk management is important, especially as the volatility of climate shocks from anthropogenic climate change will likely increase (Sachs 2007). Without rudimentary financial services, incentives (or disincentives) and compensatory mechanisms can prove to be ineffective policy mechanisms for promoting sustainable natural resource use. Direct payment schemes, such as performance-based payment incentives and tax relief, have been shown to be capable of effective biodiversity conservation. However, potential obstacles in their implementation include weak infrastructure (e.g., limited enforcement of legal contracts), uncertainty of land tenure, and limited nonagricultural investment opportunities (Ferraro and Kiss 2002). Microfinance instruments can expand investment opportunities, and coupled with appropriate legal enforcement, improve the stability of local infrastructure. The efficacy of indirect approaches towards conservation, such as eco-tourism and sustainable resource extraction, can also benefit from such measures. With expanded investment potential, local communities have the opportunity to adopt more efficient technologies and methods of resource management. In portions of the Republic of Congo, for example, the local Pygmy people have adopted the use of GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to protect native forests from logging. Expanding financial capacities helps align the welfare of local communities with the greater aims of sustainability, thus increasing the likelihood of policy success. Integrative approaches that seek to combine geography, ecology, and economics have long been suggested, and extensively qualified, as being necessary for developing holistic paradigms for decision-making and analysis. Great progress has been made in merging field-specific insights to form multidisciplinary studies. However, requisite mechanisms that bridge transdisciplinary gaps in the technical understanding of complex socio-ecological systems, especially those relating to the economic profile of natural resource use, are not mature in their development. (Most ecosystem services, for instance, are not valued [Carpenter et al. 2006]). Microfinance can help rectify information asymmetries (e.g., expanding investment opportunities for new technologies like GPS and improving local economic education). This can improve the results from valuation methods such as contingent valuation. More metrics for economic activity, such as those from credit availability, and the increased economic stability from insurance, may allow for more reliable multi-scale analysis. Furthermore, better information will provide positive feedback for policy-making and implementation. How are economic shocks induced by ecosystem changes absorbed across scales? How are ecological shocks induced by economic changes absorbed across scales? How does access to credit and insurance markets alter consumption and production behavior in a given socio-ecological landscape, and how do these changes vary across landscape types and scales? What is the relationship between biodiversity levels and the degree and method of utilization of credit and insurance in a given socio-ecological landscape, and how do these changes vary across landscape types and scales? In what ways do ecological spatial patterns and socioeconomic spatial patterns (e.g., rural urban gradients) overlap, and what do they tell us about the relationship between certain economic attributes and certain ecological attributes in a given landscape? When unraveling complex socio-ecological problems, forcibly melding different scientific and policy-making agendas usually does not work. A more appropriate approach is to identify common principles among the relevant, overlapping disciplines and then establish a new set of analytical norms and standards. The key components of a holistic approach to modern socio-ecological landscapes are both economic and ecological, and exist across different geographic scales. Simple aggregations of data from fine scales often do not produce relevant explanations at broad scales (Wu 2007). Successful valuation of ecosystem services entails the development of a robust economic profile of the local community (the basic decision-making unit behind resource allocation in rural landscapes). The monetization of rural activity through the introduction of standard financial institutions and economic education are fundamental in achieving a pragmatic and holistic understanding of modern socio-ecological landscapes. In essence, we would be cultivating social capital to more sustainably manage natural capital. As a result, we can establish stronger connections between economic development and biodiversity conservation.