Poverty solutions are also biodiversity solutions

By Nabin Pradhan, Inés Ibáñez, Ashwini Chhatre, Apurva Duddu, Harry Fischer, Peter Newton, Johan Oldekop, Sarah Wilson, Arun Agrawal

Citation

Pradhan, Nabin., Ibáñez, Inés., Chhatre, Ashwini., Duddu, Apurva., Fischer, Harry., Newton, Peter., Oldekop, Johan., Wilson, Sarah., Agrawal, Arun. Poverty solutions are also biodiversity solutions .

Abstract

Forests provide multiple ecosystem services that support the livelihoods of millions of forest-dependent people in lower- and middle-income countries (L&MICs). The persistence of those services is linked to forests maintaining functional plant communities that human activities may jeopardize. We leveraged a unique dataset that includes plot-level tree species data from 322 forests across the tropics and substantial additional data on measures of institutional,socioeconomic, demographic, and other variables. These data allow an assessment of the combined effects of environmental, socioeconomic, and governance factors on forest biodiversity, including changes over time. After accounting for natural levels of species richness, we found that direct human activities and pressures, e.g., percentage of poor households and community reliance on fuelwood, are associated with lower richness and species losses over time, while other factors, e.g., livestock presence, and type of governance, are not. Forests with increasing population density also experience declines in species richness over time. However, forests located in areas where households increased their reliance on subsistence crops are associated with positive changes in tree richness. Our analyses suggest that interventions aimed at reducing poverty will not only benefit the community but also create positive effects on community forest diversity and, thus, on the ecosystem services these forests provide.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre