IUCN - The World Conversation Union

IUCN with its vision of a “just world that values and conserves nature” believes that poverty-focused conservation has both ethical and practical perspectives that need to be addressed. Ethically speaking, it's unacceptable to conduct conservation activities in areas of poverty while neglecting the socio-economic and political needs of the people who live there, and who depend on some of the natural resources we are trying to conserve. Practically speaking, conservation activities in such areas are generally more effective if they are based on socially responsible practices that can secure and sustain wide public transport. Poverty-Environment mapping offers a valuable tool to support poverty-focused conservation. Maps of poverty and environmental conditions can pinpoint opportunities for development and are useful to donors and development agencies in allocating investment and targeting activities. Several international institutions have been doing very important work on mapping poverty related indicators and exploring their links with environmental factors.

Poverty-conservation mapping is a useful approach to explore linkages between development (people) and conservation (nature). Although poverty-environment mapping in biodiversity applications has been limited, there are numerous potential applications that are of use to IUCN and its members. Such applications range from substantiating the key role of biological resources in food security to improving geographic targeting of pro-poor ecosystem management. Mapping applications need to be used together, not in lieu of, other approaches including multi-level socio-economic assessments, traditional and community-based knowledge, community mapping, and statistical analyses.

A number of international players active in addressing the poverty-environment links have undertaken work on GIS-based tools that would help understand the links and set priorities. This website is effort to communicate poverty environment mapping efforts of several institutes, in order to enhance and improve knowledge of the methodologies and indicators being employed.