Poverty mapping at
the IUCN World Conservation Congress
November 17-25 2004, Bangkok, Thailand
Links:
IUCN, The World Conservation Union, is an association of NGOs, government agencies and intergovenmental institutions, in the field of conservation of nature. The 3rd IUCN World Conservation Congress was held in Bangkok, Thailand November 17-25 2004 with some 12,000 visiting researchers, practitioners, economists, lawyers, and educators.
With the current trend of integrating development and conservation, pushed by the Millennium declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the congress devoted a major track to Health, Poverty and Conservation, on how to integrate aspects of the human dimension into conservation work.
Under the Health, Poverty and Conservation headline there were a number of different subjects and views covered, among those tools and decision support systems - such as maps and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
UNEP/GRID-Arendal was invited to give a keynote presentation for the session on tools, produce a set of global maps and prepare a discussion paper on possible applications read more about that on the Poverty-Conservation Mapping Applications page.
The sessions on the congress with a direct relation to Poverty Mapping were:
- Decision-support systems - Their value in addressing health-poverty-conservation links - a breakout session with a series of presentations, chaired by Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN, Columbia University. From the congress programme:
The workshop will present and discuss recent work being undertaken by several organizations on the poverty-environment links, including CIESIN of Columbia University in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society, UNEP/GRID and IUCN, and others. Experience in using GIS-based decision support systems on poverty-environment links will be reviewed and the way forward and potential collaboration among the different actors involved will be discussed.
- This was further followed by a round table discussion, open for all participants, to come up with a series of concrete recommendations for the IUCN members assembly (to be considered for the upcoming work programme).
Presentations from the session
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Poverty-Conservation Mapping Applications (Keynote presentation)
Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal
Download presentation, 1.1 MB (pdf) -
Mapping Ecosystem Services and Poverty in Kenya: Work in Progress
Janet Ranganathan, WRI
Download presentation, 0.7 MB (pdf) -
Focusing on Biodiversity Conservation & Supporting Poverty Reduction
Katrina Brandon, Biodiversity Program Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS) Conservation International
Download presentation, 1.3 MB (pdf) -
The Relationship Between Poverty and Human Impacts on the Environment
Kent Redford, WCS Institute, Wildlife Conservation Society
Download presentation, 0.7 MB (pdf) -
A thoughtful cartography for poverty: a model for a participatory zoning
Federica Burini, University of Bergamo, Elaborated by the team directed by Prof. Emanuela Casti Bergamo (Italy)
Download presentation, 1.9 MB (pdf) -
Poverty Environment Decision Support Systems
Robert Everitt, Regional and Sustainable Development Department, Asian Development Bank
Download presentation, 8.8 MB (pdf) -
Poverty Environment Mapping in Rwanda: Using Decision-Support System Tools to Help Implement the MDGs
Charles McNeill, UNDP
Download presentation, 9.1 MB (pdf) -
IUCN's Species Information Service (SIS)
Stuart Salter, Manager, SIS/IUCN
Download presentation, 0.3 MB (pdf)
Conclusions from the roundtable session
- It should be recognized that the poverty indicators used at the national level (from census or HH surveys) are often "uni-dimensional" and will not necessarily be the most useful for decision making at the local level. More detailed information would be needed from participatory resource assessments and participatory mapping on specific resources used, dependencies on environmental resources, etc.
- Decision Support Systems (DSS) can be useful for scenario building using simple assumptions about how different interventions may affect poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. These can provide an improved understanding of the dynamics of the system even if the precise outcomes of a given intervention cannot be completely foreseen.
- Information needs to be packaged in such a way as to be useful to decision makers, whether they be donors seeking to target funding or policy makers seeking to develop appropriate policies. Community decision makers may be better able to assimilate "analog" data from participatory mapping exercises than digital data.
Recommendations from the roundtable session
- Create a resource that describes best practices in poverty-health-environment mapping and decision support systems with preference given to "worked examples" (i.e. cases where the mapping or DSS really made a difference to policy). This resource would include pointers to data sets that may be of use to PHE mapping.
- Develop pick lists of indicators of poverty and biodiversity interfaces. These may vary from one local context to another.
- Develop PHE hotspot maps at regional or national levels that will permit decision makers to identify those areas where there are potential conflicts between poverty alleviation goals and biodiversity conservation. These will permit a prioritization for resource allocation and a focus for problem solving.
