SciDev.Net

The first goal of eradicating hunger, for example, depends on sustainable and productive agriculture. And that in turn relies on conserving and maintaining agricultural soils, water, genetic resources and ecological processes. The capacity of fisheries to supply hundreds of millions of the world’s people with the bulk of their animal protein intake, for example, depends on maintaining ecosystems (such as mangroves and coral reefs) that provide fish with habitats and sustenance.

Three of the goals (numbers 4, 5 and 6) are aimed at improving health and sanitation. Each of these requires healthy, functioning freshwater ecosystems to provide adequate supplies of clean water, and a sustainable supply of genetic resources for both modern and traditional medicine.

Overcoming conflicts with agriculture

Achieving the various MDGs could, however, throw up potential conflicts; and these obviously need to be avoided. Take the goal to halve world hunger before 2015. One way of meeting this could be to dramatically expand agriculture by clearing natural forest. But we know that the side-effects of deforestation – such as increased soil erosion, the silting up of rivers leading to reduced fish stocks downstream, and the degradation of water quality – whether planned or unintentional, may actually significantly reduce the benefits to society of that land over the long, and even short, term.

A more innovative and sustainable approach is to incorporate biodiversity conservation into food production practices, a strategy that is increasingly referred to as ‘ecoagriculture’. This refers to the many different ways in which land can be used to produce food, while also supporting the maintenance of biodiversity and other critical ecosystem services. There is a range of methods for promoting such ‘dual-use’ of land, from reducing the amount of chemicals used, to providing more wildlife breeding sites on farms.

There are also a growing number of practical examples showing how this approach can be applied. Take, for example, the ‘Campesino to Campesino’ (CaC) programme in Nicaragua. CaC was a finalist in UNDP’s 2002 Equator Initiative Awards, which recognise outstanding community success in reducing poverty through biodiversity conservation. 

Founded in 1992, the CaC project is aimed at controlling the rapid spread of agriculture over valued natural areas, achieving food security, and restoring deforested areas in Nicaragua’s Siuna municipality. It does this by, for example, promoting the use of leguminous plants and green fertilisers as cover crops that stabilise the soil and lead the way for crop diversification and improved land use planning.

As a result of CaC’s work and its network of volunteer ‘promoters’, maize yields in Siuna have more than doubled and bean production has more than tripled. At the same time, CaC has helped to replace destructive agricultural practices that had taken a devastating toll on the nearby Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, a species-rich site with sustainable systems that ensure food security, increase family incomes and protect local biodiversity.

Through UNDP’s work with the Equator Initiative, and the Small Grants Programme funded through the Global Environment Facility (GEF), we have become aware of literally thousands of other examples of such ‘win-win’ initiatives all over the world. We need to learn from these innovative communities, and to help other communities learn from them and follow their example. This is a focus of UNDP’s work in biodiversity.

An opportunity for the poor

In fact, there is a silver lining to all this. Most of the world’s biodiversity exists in the economically poorest countries. This provides the poor with opportunities to enhance their income by entering emerging markets for sustainably produced, certified forest and agricultural products, as well as ecotourism.

Poor rural communities even have a chance to compete in the global economy via payment for ecosystem services by those who benefit the most from them. Such arrangements might include watershed protection contracts (where, for example, users of the water or hydroelectricity dependent on these watersheds make payments to communities for protecting the forests), as well as many other market-based mechanisms. Such an approach would of course rely on those communities not being excluded by insecure land tenure, high transaction costs or unfair subsidies.

Globally, we are seeing a real opportunity to advance all the Millennium Development Goals without undermining our ecological capital. But this will happen only when we recognise that poor communities have an urgent stake in safeguarding their own ecosystems at the same time as meeting their basic human needs.

In other words, we need to go down a path that recognises that for rural people living in poverty, development can’t happen without the conservation of biodiversity. The real key to a sustainable future is to remember that our efforts towards poverty reduction and conservation are mutually reinforcing. In other words, our programmes should focus on ‘biodiversity for development’ not ‘biodiversity or development.’