Building on Hidden Opportunities to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals: Poverty Reduction through Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity

The CBD objectives clearly provide much opportunity for building on the links between livelihoods development and the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. This is further supported by the Convention’s explicit recognition that ‘economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries.’ The problem is that there is little guidance, insufficient models, and a lack of effective tools and mechanisms which are needed to achieve conservation objectives, whilst at the same time positively enhancing poverty reduction processes. The CBD presents a comprehensive series of pragmatic and innovative principles for action (Box 1), which have been further elaborated by six Conferences of the Parties. Yet there has been insufficient advancement in operational terms. This lack of progress should be taken very seriously as biodiversity loss, together with other forms of environmental degradation, has the potential to undermine progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs see www.undp.org/mdg and Box 3). It is also essential to acknowledge that the ‘environment’, including biodiversity, offers many interesting poverty reduction opportunities yet these are often overlooked, and may function outside the prevailing policy environment. For instance, it is unlikely that the first MDG: ‘eradication of extreme poverty and hunger’ through ‘halving, between 19902015, the proportion of people whose income is under $1 day and in hunger’ can be achieved solely through the adoption of approaches to poverty reduction that focus on private accumulation of material goods. And, even if poverty is successfully halved, in the absence of more sustainable approaches and ‘reduced impact’ technologies to resource extraction and production, the associated pressures exerted on the world’s biodiversity are likely to threaten the sustainability of the poverty eradication process itself, and is likely to push the