Forests and poverty: how has our understanding of the relationship been changed by experience?

Abstract

Understanding of the relationship between forests and the poor has grown enormously, especially in the last twenty years. Aid donors worked on poverty reduction in the forest sector in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, but thereafter broadened their attention to address climate change mitigation, better forest governance and timber legality, and payments for environmental services. There has so far been an incomplete integration of new insights into the nature of poor people's reliance on forests, of their own efforts to use that reliance to escape from poverty, and of current forestry aid concerns. Future projects need to choose interventions which make better use of the results now available about forestpoverty relationships, both for the better conservation of forests, and for better focus on the livelihoods of the forest-reliant poor as they continue to try to move out of poverty.