Craig Leisher

Measuring the impacts of community-based grasslands management in Mongolia's Gobi.

We assessed a donor-funded grassland management project designed to create both conservation and livelihood benefits in the rangelands of Mongolias Gobi desert. The project ran from 1995 to 2006, and we used remote sensing Normalized Differential Vegetation Index data from 1982 to 2009 to compare project grazing sites to matched control sites before and after the projects implementation. We found that the productivity of project grazing sites was on average within 1% of control sites for the 20 years before the project but generated 11% more biomass on average than the control areas from 2000 to 2009. To better understand the benefits of the improved grasslands to local people, we conducted 280 household interviews, 8 focus group discussions, and 31 key informant interviews across 6 districts. We found a 12% greater median annual income as well as a range of other socioeconomic benefits for project households compared to control households in the same areas. Overall, the project generated measurable benefits to both nature and people. The key factors underlying project achievements that may be replicable by other conservation projects include the community-driven approach of the project, knowledge exchanges within and between communities inside and outside the country, a project-supported local community organizer in each district, and strong community leadership.

Does the gender composition of forest and fishery management groups affect resource governance and conservation outcomes: a systematic map protocol

BackgroundIn the fields of environmental governance and biodiversity conservation, there is a growing awareness that gender has an influence on resource use and management. Several studies argue that empowering women in resource governance can lead to beneficial outcomes for resource sustainability and biodiversity conservation. Yet how robust is the evidence to support this claim? Here we focus on the forestry and fisheries sectors to answer the primary question: What is the evidence that the gender composition of forest and fishery management groups affects resource governance and conservation outcomes? Our objective is to produce a systematic map of the evidence highlighting, inter alia, the geographic distribution and quality of the evidence, the consistency and robustness of the findings, and where further research is needed.Methods/designThis protocol provides the details of the methodology. The search terms used to identify relevant articles were developed in an iterative process using the phraseology of the primary question, Boolean operators, and a list of synonyms for each term. The search terms will be used to identify relevant articles in CAB Abstracts, Scopus, AGRIS, AGRICOLA, Google Scholar, and Google. A test library of 12 articles will ensure that the search captures the relevant literature. Searches will be in English but will not be restricted by publication date. The websites of 22 international organisations with a known interest in gender-related issues will be screened for relevant documents. The gender-focussed researchers at large conservation NGOs, the members of the Poverty and Conservation Learning Group, and the members of the Gender and Environment Working Group will be invited to submit relevant documents. The list of references of included articles will be screened to identify other relevant articles in a ‘backwards snowballing’ approach. The inclusion criteria are that an article refers to women or gender, forests or fisheries, a resource management group, a quantitative comparison, and an environmental governance or biodiversity conservation outcome in a non-OECD country. A data extraction template with 27 variables will be used to assess the included articles. The output will be a narrative report with descriptive statistics and an evidence-gap map.

Striking a Balance: Socioeconomic Development and Conservation in Grassland through Community-Based Zoning

The goal of preserving nature is often in conflict with economic development and the aspirations of the rural poor. Nowhere is this more striking than in native grasslands, which have been extensively converted until a mere fraction of their original extent remains. This is not surprising; grasslands flourish in places coveted by humans, primed for agriculture, plantations, and settlements that nearly always trump conservation efforts. The Umgano grassland conservation and poverty reduction project in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa uses community-based spatial planning to balance the conversion of its lower-conservation value grasslands to a timber plantation, while conserving higher-value grasslands for heritage purposes and managed livestock grazing. Ten years after project launch, we measured the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of the project using Normalized Differential Vegetation Index remote sensing data and over 500 household interviews, as compared with similar non-conserved areas. Zoned management of the Umgano area had resulted in between 9% and 17% greater average peak production in the grassland areas compared to control sites. There was also a 21% gain in incomes for the roughly one hundred people employed by the forestry efforts, when compared to others in their village. Community-based spatial zoning is an overlooked tool for balancing conservation and development but may require, as we found in Umgano, certain critical factors including strong local leadership, an accountable financial management mechanism to distribute income, outside technical expertise for the zoning design, and community support.

The role of marine protected areas in alleviating poverty in the Asia-Pacific

[Extract] Small-scale fishers in developing countries depend heavily on near-shore marine fish capture (Pauly 2006, SOFIA 2008). Yet marine fisheries in many developing countries are underregulated and overfished (Agnew et al. 2009, Le Gallic and Cox 2006, Varkey et al. 2009). Global marine capture fish production peaked in the mid-1980s, and one in three marine fisheries are now considered overfished (SOFIA 2008, Worm et al. 2009). The overlapping issues of local livelihoods and fisheries management are particularly apparent in coastal coral reefs.

Conservation and the World's Poorest of the Poor

There is a large geographic overlap between areas with globally important biodiversity and extreme rural poverty. The key players working on conservation–poverty issues frequently emphasize either conservation or poverty reduction but rarely both. There is, however, suggestive evidence that some conservation initiatives have benefited the poor, and even the extreme poor. There are also instances where a conservation initiative has pushed local people into extreme poverty. For poverty reduction, increasing biomass that has value to the poor may be more important than increasing or maintaining the biodiversity of an area.

Ecology–Poverty Considerations for Developing Sustainable Biomass Energy Options

An estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide, mostly in rural areas, suffer from energy poverty (World Bank 2009 ), that is, they have insuffi cient energy sources for cooking, heating, and the 101 small tasks that become big tasks when there are energy shortages. Energy has many forms, as introduced in the chapter by Doll in this section, but for the poor, much of their energy comes from biomass.