Local communities need to control local resources to defeat poverty – UN report

Challenging conventional approaches in the war on poverty, a new United Nations-backed report today stressed the urgent need to look beyond aid projects, debt relief and trade reform and focus on local natural resources to address the crisis in all parts of the globe.

UN Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Klaus Toepfer called the report, World Resources 2005: The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty, “essential reading for any world leader serious about defeating poverty” at next month's summit meeting at UN Headquarters in New York.

“In the past the environment has been viewed as something like a Hermes silk tie or a Gucci handbag – a luxury only affordable when all other issues have been resolved,” he said.

“But this World Resources Institute (WRI) report… overturns this myth and underlines in graphic detail the importance of ‘nature’s’ natural capital alongside financial and human capital,” he added.

The study is the 11th in a series of biennial reports on global environment and governance issues published jointly by UNEP, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and the environmental think tank WRI.

It finds that environmental organizations have not addressed poverty and development groups have not considered the environment enough in the past. The model presented in the report details how natural resources – soils, forests, water, fisheries – managed at the local level are frequently the most effective means for the world’s rural poor people to create wealth for themselves.

“I would urge Presidents and Prime Ministers to make this WRI report… indispensable parts of their pre-Summit reading,” Mr Toepfer said of the gathering of more than an estimated 170 heads of state on 14-16 September to discuss UN reforms and take stock of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

“I am sure that the conclusions will suggest to them, as they do to me, fresh, imaginative, sensible and truly sustainable approaches to the pressing development issues of the day,” he added. The MDGs seek to halve extreme poverty and hunger, slash maternal and infant mortality, and increase access to health care, education, water and sanitation, all by 2015.

In case studies cited in the report to demonstrate how local stewardship of nature can be a powerful means of fighting poverty, the Tanzanian Government gave control over restoring 700,000 acres of denuded forests and grazing lands to local Sukuma people, who now have higher household incomes, better diets, as well as increased populations of tree, bird and mammal species.

In another example the Government of Fiji gave Ucunivanua villagers control of clam beds and coastal waters. Thanks to local restrictions placed on fishing, mangrove lobster and harvestable clam populations have increased dramatically. In India, community control over the watershed has led to a nearly six-fold increase in the cash value of crops grown in Darewadi Village.

“Community stewardship of local resources should be a critical element of any poverty-reduction model,” UNDP energy and environment official Olav Kjørven said. “With greater income from the environment – call it ‘environmental income’ – poor families experience better nutrition and health, and begin to accumulate wealth. In other words, they begin the journey out of poverty.”

WRI President, Jonathan Lash said traditional assumptions about addressing poverty treat the environment “almost as an afterthought,” while World Bank vice president of sustainable development Ian Johnson warned: “We need to stop thinking of the environment as a passive element. It is a fundamental part of community-based decision making.”