Global Forces of Change: Implications for Forest-Poverty Dynamics
Forest fragmentation and the increase in zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, demonstrate the need to attend to the linkages among forest cover change, health, and sustainable development.
Context
Global economic, political, and environmental forces shape the forms poverty takes and the pathways that lead to it. Global changes, which can be opaque at local or regional scales, create enormous shocks that limit efforts to alleviate poverty and alter human-forest relationships. These changes create uncertainty regarding the efficacy of existing policy interventions to alleviate poverty, especially for those dependent on forest resources. On the other hand, such changes may also generate socioeconomic opportunities that help move people out of poverty. Thus, it is useful to consider global forces of change to anticipate or forecast likely scenarios in forest-poverty dynamics.
Forest fragmentation and the increase in zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, demonstrate the need to attend to the linkages among forest cover change, health, and sustainable development. These connected changes also exemplify how transnational processes can directly and indirectly affect communities living in, near or otherwise relying on forests. Forest-reliant households move in and out of poverty through multiple conduits. In this paper, we seek to understand and develop an analytical framework for examining how global forces affect these pathways. While global changes have impacts on forests and people across scales, our focus is on local poverty dynamics.
Global changes affect poverty through their direct impacts on tree cover and by altering the magnitude and distribution of forest and tree use. Transnational mechanisms can help move forest- and tree-reliant people and households out of poverty by creating new economic opportunities; they may enable households to preserve their current economic status and well-being by maintaining the flow of forest and tree-related goods and services; they may affect transient poverty by changing risk exposure, thereby temporarily pushing households above or below national poverty lines; and /or, people may be driven deeper into poverty through increased uncertainty and exposure to hazards or because access to trees and other forest resources becomes more costly as a result of global changes. Differing socio-economic conditions across geographies and nation-states will dictate how these pathways unfold
for any community, household or individual.
Research
Acknowledging the need to understand global to local influences, this article discusses the implications for forest-poverty dynamics of six major global forces. These are: (i) climatic impacts, (ii) growth in commodity markets, (iii) trends in private and public forest sector financing, (iv) technological advances and interconnectivity, (v) global socio-political movements, and (vi) emerging infectious diseases. These forces act on communities by modifying the role of forest and tree-based goods and services in their lives and livelihoods.
Conclusions
This article has identified a set of cumulative threats and opportunities that global changes pose to forest-reliant poor households. Many of the global changes discussed in this paper act as shocks to households – they manifest as negative health impacts, land losses, land-use conflicts, loss of resource access and political support, among others. However, they may also open new opportunities that contribute to income and employment of forest-reliant people, enhance their connection to broader networks, and empower them with strengthened self-governance and technical skills. Democratizing the use of technology and building capacity for data interpretation will further help to empower forest communities. Private and public financing in improved forest management can build resilience and, when aligned with social and environmental outcomes, can enhance the position of forest-reliant peoples.
There are large gaps in knowledge related to both global trends and forest-poverty dynamics. The published literature on varying effects of climate change on the forest proximate poor and of market supply chains on human welfare, for instance, is limited. Thus, our analyses related to global changes depend, in part, on historical evidence or conceptual theories of change. Furthermore, the analysis in this chapter does not address meta-trends such as urbanization or broad-based economic globalization that have indirect, uncertain, but potentially large effects on the forest-reliant poor. It is also unable to do justice to the uncertainties related to available projections on future global changes.
The poor are not a homogenous class of people and are differentiated by gender, access to assets, social status, and so on. Thus, global changes will likely have distinct effects on different sub-groups (women, landless labor, Indigenous communities) based on pre-existing inequities and socio-economic and political realities. Few studies that examine the poverty impacts of forest-related policy, institutional, and market reforms provide evidence of differentiated impacts. Thus, understanding how global changes land on different sub-groups among poor households, and the role of policy reforms in reducing poverty among these sub- groups considering global changes, is an important area for additional research.
Knowledge of socio-political conditions may also help clarify the differentiated effects of global changes on different demographic groups. There are also potential feedback loops in regions where global changes degrade forest and increase poverty, which may, in turn, lead to further degradation of forest and tree-based systems, resulting in a vicious cycle of poverty and forest loss. These complex feedback loops could be empirically traced in national contexts where global and local actions collude to damage forests and increase poverty.
This article provides opportunities to consider where poverty alleviation and forest management can coalesce to serve ecological, social and economic goals. Given that global forces of change on forest-poverty dynamics will vary across local contexts, it will be necessary to continue broad-scale and case study research to better understand the implications of global changes on specific forest management and use mechanisms. Research into measures across sectors that account for the combined strength of these (and other) global forces may serve to improve outcomes on forest-poverty dynamics and lead to alternative models of development for forest landscapes.
This report was authored by Priya Shyamsundar, Laura Aileen Sauls, Jennifer Zavaleta Cheek, Kira Sullivan-Wiley, J.T. Erbaugh and P.P. Krishnapriya.