Forests Sourcebook - HCV Resource Network

NOTE 1.1
Mainstreaming the Role of Forests in Poverty Alleviation:
Measuring Poverty-Forest Linkages
Forests provide a significant portion of forest
dwellers’ subsistence goods and services, and
income. Yet the contribution of forests to income
and the level of forest dependence are seldom systematically
documented. Income streams from forests and the role of
forests as safety nets are underestimated and the potential of
forests to alleviate poverty is often unexploited. The lack of
quantitative and readily available information on the role of
forests in contributing to poverty reduction is a major constraint
to mainstreaming the use of forests in poverty alleviation.
A consequence is that the role of forests in poverty
reduction is not reflected in any significant way in nationallevel
strategies, such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy
(PRS) process. In the same way, those countries that have
been developing NFPs (NFPs; see note 6.1, Using National
Forest Programs to Mainstream Forest Issues) have not
tended to explicitly link forest issues to poverty reduction or
to the achievement of the MDGs. If PRSPs fail to incorporate
forestry, national efforts to reduce poverty and vulnerability
will undercount the critical role that forest resources
currently play—and the potentially greater role they could
play—in the livelihoods of the poor.
There are two constraints to improving measurement
and mainstreaming of linkages between forests and poverty.
First, most countries have little data available to illustrate
how forests contribute to the livelihoods of poor households.
The Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS;
www.worldbank.org/lsms) have a variable on fuelwood
consumption, but owing to the logistical and cultural challenges
of surveying forest-dwelling and forest-reliant households
in remote areas, the data associated with this variable
are limited. It also is difficult to accurately measure and
attribute the cash value of extracted forest products to
households residing in high-population-density areas and
forest-agriculture mosaics (Chomitz et al. 2006).
The second challenge is that the data that do exist are
rarely presented in ways that are meaningful to those
designing PRSPs and NFPs. Forest specialists are more
familiar with reporting forest information about physical
resources (trees planted, forest cover improved, or timber
sold) than livelihoods, with the exception of quantifying the
number of people employed in the forest sector. Poverty
experts and macroeconomists are unfamiliar with the use of
forests and NFPs and tend to underestimate the contribution
of forests and off-farm natural resources to livelihoods.
OPERATIONAL ASPECTS
There is little knowledge about how rural households
depend on forest and tree resources to meet their daily
needs—and even less about the potential of these resources
to reduce poverty. This failure stems in part from the fact
that forest products, especially nontimber forest products,
fall through the cracks of sector-specific data collection,
with neither forestry nor agricultural agencies collecting
data on household collection, use, and sale of forest products.
A simple methodology is needed to capture this contribution
and to demonstrate its ultimate relevance to many
of the MDGs. This is what the Poverty-Forest Linkages
Toolkit offers (box 1.4). This section provides a summary of
key steps for measuring poverty-forest linkages and mainstreaming
this information, based on the approach detailed
in the toolkit.
Only at the national level can current country processes
for poverty data gathering be identified and understood and
effort invested in enabling these to take forest data into
account. And only through local enquiry can a picture be
developed of the two key ways in which forests have an
impact on the lives of the poor—positively through livelihood
support, and negatively if use of forests is formally
illegal. To this end, the toolkit lays out a step-by-step process
to gather and analyze the necessary information, detailing
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