Poverty alleviation

As a contribution to clarifying the contested claims, IIED, UNEP-WCMC and the African Wildlife Foundation organised a symposium in April 2010. The purpose of the symposium was to explore the current state of knowledge and the evidence base for claims and counter-claims, in order to better understand what is assumption rather than fact.

As a policy research organisation, the International Institute for Environment and Development has evolved key concepts, theories and ways of working in sustainable development since 1973. The big idea we explore here is banking on biodiversity. This approach rests on the fact that much rural poverty is concentrated in the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

More than twenty years have passed since community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) rose to prominence in different parts of Africa as a strategy for rural development, local empowerment, and conservation. Led by new ideas about the merits of decentralized, collective resource governance regimes, and creative field experiments such as Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE, these community-based approaches evolved in a wide range of ecological, political, and social contexts across Africa.

In this abridged version of its report, the Task Force outlines the bold yet practical actions needed to increase access to water and sanitation. The report underscores the need to focus on the global sanitation crisis, which contributes to the death of 3,900 children each day, to increase access to domestic water supply, and to invest in integrated development and management of water resources.

The reduction of world poverty is a major challenge for the international community over the next decade. It is increasingly clear that the our capacity to successfully achieve this objective will be undermined if the natural resource base for development is threatened.

;

This publication brings together the core recommendations of the UN Millennium Project. By outlining practical investment strategies and approaches to financing them, the report presents an operational framework that will allow even the poorest countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.