IUCN has committed itself by launching this Initiative to make poverty reduction a central objective to conservation efforts around the world. Moreover, IUCN with its Members, Commissions and world-wide Secretariat is uniquely placed to contribute to supporting the linkages between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing.
Of particular importance in moving IUCN’s poverty agenda will be its Observer Status in the United Nations General Assembly. In November 2005, Ambassador and Permanent Observer Bhagwat Singh delivered a message during the General Assembly Sixtieth Session, expressing IUCN’s commitment to combine forces with its members and partners to make conservation work more effectively for the poor. He then stated that “…there is a direct relationship between the health of ecosystems and the opportunities of the poor to increase their food security, improve their health, build assets, reduce risks and have more secure lives”.
International Policy in Support of Poverty Reduction
IUCN will also contribute to conservation-poverty work through its ongoing participation in, and support for, the Poverty and Environment Partnership (PEP) annual meeting, an informal network of development agencies that aims to address key poverty-environment issues. It is noteworthy that many of the bilateral members of this partnership are framework donors to IUCN’s programme and/or provide substantial financial support to IUCN’s programme. Initial support for development of the Initiative has been provided by Italian Development Cooperation Agency, Swiss Development Cooperation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and Norwegian Agency for Development, as well as several key IUCN programmes.
In addition, the Initiative fits within the current of increasing attention that the international community is placing on poverty reduction. Furthermore, over the past decades, the link between human well being and the environment has become increasingly recognized by policy makers and practitioners in the development and conservation sectors, as well as by a considerable number of experts and institutions worldwide.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent a unique guideline for identifying the world's main development challenges. These goals, which were drawn from the actions and targets contained in the Millennium Declaration of the year 2000, provide a framework for prioritizing interventions to reduce poverty, improve health, provide education, foster equity and provide environmental security. Recognizing the link between the status of environmental resources (= biodiversity) and poverty, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) set a target to “achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels to alleviate poverty”.
IUCN believes that in order to deliver these internationally-agreed development goals, it is crucial to address three key challenges: improving governance of natural resources, increasing investment in sustainable management of those resources, and employing relevant technologies, specifically landscape-scale management. To confront these challenges, IUCN proposed specific actions for implementation contained in its Depend on Nature report, launched at the U.N. Headquarters in New York on 29 June 2005. This document is an action plan to help achieve the MDGs through environmental management. It includes some ‘First Steps’ that provide a guide to link human development, ecosystem services and the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity.
The recent findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and completed in March 2005, also underline the importance and value of ecosystem services to human wellbeing. It asserts that some 60% of the planet’s ecosystems are degraded or unsustainably managed and concludes that “the degradation of ecosystem services is harming many of the world’s poorest people and is sometimes the principal factor causing poverty”. The MA specifies that additional and innovative financing mechanisms are needed to ensure that the ecosystem services on which development depends are sustained in the long term. It also points out that unless we take action to mitigate the decline in ecosystem services, the costs to society will be substantial.
In March 2005, U.N. Secretary General presented his most comprehensive reform and policy agenda called “In Larger Freedom”. In this report he expressed his concern for the loss of biodiversity which is occurring at an unprecedented rate within and across countries. He stated that this trend “severely undermines health, livelihoods, food production and clean water, and increases the vulnerability of populations to natural disasters and climate change”.
Also as a part of this international network striving to raise global awareness of the poor, it is worth mentioning the work of a new, independent, global initiative: The High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. This program sets out to explore how nations can reduce poverty through reforms that expand access to legal protection and opportunities for all. The Commission’s unique mission is built on the conviction that poverty can only be eradicated if governments give all citizens, especially the poor, a legitimate stake in the economy by extending the rule of law, making access to users’ and property rights and other legal protections not the privilege of the few but the right of all citizens.
IUCN cannot reduce poverty on its own. Thus CPRI is designed to promote partnerships across these organizational boundaries. The initiative seeks to cooperate with a vast range of sectors, including private, community, academic, governmental, and non-governmental, in order to work under one global strategic umbrella. Consequently, as a result of its 3rd Session held in Bangkok in November 2004, the World Conservation Congress decided that IUCN should put into practice within the framework of its Mission and Vision, actions that contribute to combating poverty through nature conservation.
