Counting on the environment

Counting on the Environment: the contribution of forests to rural livelihoods
15 June 2011, The Royal Society, London, United Kingdom
 

The role that environmental income plays in poverty alleviation remains poorly documented and not obvious to most policy-makers. The existing tools for assessing poverty and income fall short of capturing the importance of environmental income, so that its true value in the livelihoods of the world’s rural poor remains largely invisible (“the hidden harvest”). The aim of this conference is to put the environment more firmly onto the poverty agenda, and to strengthen the case for more systematic data collection on the dependence of poor people on natural resources.

At the core of the conference will be the presentation of results from CIFOR's six year Poverty and Environment Network project (PEN), which is arguably the largest and most comprehensive global analysis of tropical forests and poverty (>8,000 households in 40 study sites from 25 developing countries). The scope of the conference is however, much broader than PEN. Other presentations will be given by the IUCN, IFRI and the World Bank, and the day will finish with an interactive panel discussion with experts in the field, making the conference a global forum on the role of environmental income and forests in rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation.

Please join us for what promises to be a landmark event for forests and poverty research.

For more information and to register, please visit the conference website:  http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/london-conference or contact the conference organisers at cifor-pen [at] cgiar.org