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About the Initiative
Introduction
In September 2005, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) launched the Conservation for Poverty Reduction Initiative (CPRI) to harness and focus the institutional capacity in biodiversity conservation as a tool for improving human well-being and to provide a facility to mobilize needed complementary skills through partnerships and alliances. IUCN, with its Membership, expert networks in Commissions and world-wide Secretariat is uniquely placed to contribute to supporting that link.
Context
Healthy ecosystems deliver essential services to all people – but are especially important to the rural poor. Poor countries are largely dependent on their natural capital to fuel economic development. At the local level poor people are dependent on those natural resources for subsistence and for products to sell.
In spite of this, over the past decades increasing desertification, loss of soil fertility, changing climatic conditions, economic and civil instability have contributed to decreasing ecosystem capacity to meet human needs. The consequence is a spiral of environmental deterioration as demand increases and supply decreases resulting in deepening poverty. The strong link between poverty and the status of biodiversity and ecosystem resources is becoming increasingly apparent to policy makers and practitioners in the development and conservation sectors.
Within the conservation community there is strong belief that poverty is correlated with reduced status of biodiversity resources and ecosystem capacity. Nevertheless, there are few examples where environmental/biodiversity conservation needs are factored into development assistance actions designed to reduce poverty. It is against this background, that the Initiative makes poverty reduction a central objective to conservation efforts around the world.
What does Conservation for Poverty Reduction imply?
 Approaches to reduce poverty must:
• Address fundamental conditions that affect individuals’ security;
• Focus on improving peoples’ capacities to manage and use their natural resources sustainably;
• Provide tools and other means for rural people to earn income.
For biodiversity conservation to effectively contribute to rural poverty reduction requires attention to improving human well-being through:
• Empowering people to influence state institutions, participate in political processes, engage in local decision-making;
• Enhancing capacities through education, acquisition of skills, and better health;
• Improving governance that promotes peoples’ rights to access lands, resources, financing and other economic assets as well as; and
• Enhancing security by reducing vulnerability to unplanned events such as economic shocks, disease, natural disasters.
Outcomes
IUCN’s CPRI will address five broad outcomes:
• Practical tools: Manuals, technical assistance and other tools provide resource managers with easily accessible practical guidance on how to balance natural resource management with economic development needs are being employed by rural.
• Government commitment: All pertinent sectors of national government incorporate environmentally-based approaches into their development policies.
• Mobilizing skills: A facility facilitates access to, and delivery of, complementary skills necessary to achieve sustained poverty reduction.
• Supportive policies: Bilateral and multilateral donors incorporate environmental and biodiversity conservation in poverty-reduction funding; and
• Legal rights: Civil society is empowered to manage renewable natural resources for sustainable use, through rights of access that are based on social and gender equity.
How does IUCN fund the Conservation for Poverty Reduction Initiative?
The programme document for the Initiative mentions a figure of 300 million US Dollars. This is a rough estimate of the total budget of the initiative over a five year period, and therefore an annual budget of approximately 100 million US Dollars.
Not all the activities that will contribute to the global initiative are IUCN activities, and not all the funds will be managed by IUCN. An initiative of this nature will include many partners and partner activities. We therefore expect that half of the total budget is actually parallel finance through other organizations.
The initiative comprises a number of ongoing and planned IUCN activities, including the current IUCN portfolio that directly impacts on local livelihoods and poverty reduction. We estimate this to be 25 million USD per annum.
The rest of the budget is contained in several large IUCN sub-initiatives, in particular a South Asian ecosystem restoration project, a global Landscape and Livelihood Programme and a Pan-African poverty initiative.
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