Environment & Poverty Times


06 2009


Business opportunities and green jobs


Business opportunities and new green jobs are the life blood of a more sustainable future. New opportunities are shaped by drivers such as changing consumer tastes and preferences, government regulations and innovation. This may also lead to more meaningful new jobs for individuals all over the planet.


Growing the wealth of the poor for a green economy


By Lauren Withey


Three-quarters of the world’s poorest citizens – those living on less than $2 per day – are directly dependent on natural resources for a significant part of their daily livelihoods. Yet the sustainability of such resources and the rural poor’s access to them is frequently under threat from more powerful forces. Artisanal fishermen are losing their catch to large trawlers, forest-dwellers are losing their homes to timber companies, and rural water supplies are being diverted to urban areas and large-scale commodity farming. Climate change, meanwhile, is altering natu- ral resource patterns around the world.


Without secure access to the natural resources upon which they have traditionally relied, the rural poor look elsewhere to create liveli- hoods. This leads to relocation and accompa- nying social strife, as well as less sustainable resource stewardship – if a farmer believes the land he is farming will only be his for one or two cropping seasons, he is likely to farm it differently than if he were confident that he would have access to the land for a decade.


Yet where the rural poor are offered secure and long-term access to natural resources, they are often able to build enterprises that create economic, social, and environmental resilience. The steps to fostering such re- silience are also steps along the path out of poverty. These findings, which emerge from the World Resources Report, Roots of Resil- ience: Growing the Wealth of the Poor, are more important than ever within the current global downturn – building greener, more resilient, and more inclusive societies is the only road to lasting economic recovery.


Setting the context The focus of Roots of Resilience emerged from a growing awareness that a number of troubling features of our global community are tightly intertwined – and that addressing them will require equally integrated solu- tions. These features include: The world is wealthier, but wealth tends to be highly concentrated in a small percent- age of the population. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 found that 15 out the 24 major ecosystem services it assessed are being degraded or used unsustainably. We are already experiencing the conse- quences of climate change; the pace of these early changes, such as polar ice melt, is more rapid than any models had predicted.


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We have made commendable progress in reducing the number of people living in poverty; but that achievement has been lim- ited to China and a handful of South Asia countries. The plain fact is that almost half the world’s population – 2.6 billion people – continues to live on $2 per day or less; one billion of them on $1 per day or less. In spite of becoming a predominately urban world in 2007, three-quarters of the poorest families still live in rural areas. High population growth rates in rural ar- eas and the return of unemployed urban dwellers back to the countryside is driving these numbers up. These rural-dwellers depend in large measure directly on natu- ral resources for their existence.


These five features of our global society are tightly connected. For example, wood usage and meat consumption has risen rapidly in wealthier countries and fast- growing states like China and India in recent years. This has increased pressure on forest resources in developing states, pushing the poor off their former land. Higher logging rates and burning of the forest for agriculture and cattle ranching contributes to the degradation of forest ecosystems and to climate change. Given the interconnectedness of these issues, any attempt to address one of them must also address their links.


Roots of Resilience identifies an intersec- tion point at which all five of these features can be addressed: ecosystem-based enter- prise development. The book contends that the scaling up of ecosystem-based enterprises, such as fishermen’s or coffee cooperatives, increases rural resilience, reinforcing the ecological foundations of the rural resource base and providing communities with a stepping-stone along a pathway out of poverty.


Ecosystem-based enterprises and a green economy In the year since Roots of Resilience was first published, the global economic downturn has sparked an increasing awareness of the unsustainable nature of the global growth model. Though it was tempting to think that the strong growth trend of the past might last indefinitely, such optimism has been grounded in inaccurate valuations of assets, including natural resources.


Any accurate valuation of these resources should take into account the wide-ranging


Households across the developing world depend directly upon natural resources for daily sustenance and livelihoods. Degradation of these resources forces women and children to walk long distances each day – sometimes more than 20 miles – just to find fuel wood and water for their families. John Talbott, World Resources Institute, 2007.


contributions they make to society beyond their immediate economic value in the marketplace. For example, the contribution that trees make to preventing soil erosion is almost never fully reflected in timber prices – yet erosion control is a valuable ecosystem service that improves water retention and soil fertility, and lowers harmful sedimentation in waterways. Such pricing inaccuracies drive global markets toward overexploiting natural resources and result in economic outcomes such as the commodity price spikes of 2008. The populations that depend directly upon these resources suffer the most as a result.


As part of the recognition of the need to green the global economy, important tools are being developed and implemented that help to internalize the environmental and social values of our natural resources – a global carbon market is one example.


But we need not wait for markets to perfect natural resource pricing in order to move toward a more sustainable and inclusive economy. Roots of Resilience highlights one step we can take right now in this direc- tion, by promoting rural ecosystem-based enterprises.


The Guatemalan government divided 13 percent of the Petén’s tropical forest region into concessions in the mid- 1990s. These parcels were then distributed to legally constituted community groups under 25 year leases. NGOs and development organizations worked with these community groups to help them to sustainably manage and derive value from the forest. World Resources Institute, 2008.


The case studies of ecosystem enterprises that form the empirical foundation for Roots of Resilience indicate that any success in overcoming poverty takes time and persis- tence (see Box 1: Forestry in Guatemala). The factors that go into this success – including a wide range of governance variables – are


complex and interrelated. Roots of Resilience identifies those elements without which any promise of sustained growth is greatly diminished, focusing on three in particular: community ownership and self-interest; intermediate organizations that foster rural skills and capacity; and networks that support rural producers and provide learning struc- tures. With these factors present, resourceful and resilient communities can emerge.


Community ownership and self-interest Ensuring that communities have self-inter- est in stewarding the land around them is a fundamental part of securing benefits for communities from their natural resources. While rural “ownership” rarely implies that individuals have the full bundle of rights typically associated with property ownership, it does mean that they have secure access to a particular resource for an extended period of time. Only by feeling that their access is secure will individuals be willing to invest in the long-term sustainability of their resource.


True ownership, as defined in Roots of Re- silience, also involves not only a granting of rights but also a commitment by the com- munity or a subset thereof to maintaining the resource. In a watershed management project, for example, individuals may make this commitment in the form of providing labour to build watershed management infrastructure, or sacrifices of personal water consumption for the benefit of the full community.


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