Poverty & Conservation Facts

• About 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. This is almost half of the world population.
  
  
• Many of them, over a billion people, live in extreme poverty with less than $1 a day to spend.
  
  
• Hunger kills 10 million people a year.
  
  
• Seventy percent of the estimated 1.1 billion poor people in the world live in rural areas and depend on the productivity of ecosystems for their livelihoods.
  
  
• In sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of poor people is forecast to rise from 315 million in 1999 to 404 million by 2015, the dependence on wild harvests is particularly high for both rural and urban populations.
  
  
• A recent study of the economic valuation of some ecosystem resources and services in Senegal has shown that, “wild plants and game appear to be most important to the poorest households, contributing up to 50% of their annual cash income”.

Source: Ecosystems and Human Wellbeing: Biodiversity Synthesis. http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx