Sugato Dutt: Resource use, tiger conservation and the local community: perspectives from the Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal, India

The Indian state’s strict legislations and management prescriptions to protect the tiger have been hailed across the world as a “model” conservation program. However, frequent incidents of tiger poaching and the occasional (often violent) protests against park management indicate that all is really not well. Moreover, a nationwide scientific census showed that at least one of the tiger reserves had no tigers (!), prompting the government to initiate a fact finding commission to assess the situation. Conflict between conservation and local communities is of course not unique to India. However, a large human population and the consequent demand for land and resources is bound to exacerbate the conflict. more

PEN Workshop in Barcelona: The Long Walk to Impact

Forty five PEN partners and resource persons descended upon Barcelona - the beautiful capital of Catalonia, in north east Spain - from 8-12 January to launch the second phase of the Poverty Environment Network (PEN) project.

PEN is an ambitious, tropics-wide collection of uniform socio-economic and environmental data at household and village levels. The project was launched by CIFOR in 2004. While data collection is still ongoing in many sites across the tropics, the second phase of PEN is about how to make sense of the 300 000-odd questionnaire pages collected from 9 000 households in 26 countries.  more

Nick Hogarth: The potential for natural resource based poverty alleviation in China– the case of bamboo in Tianlin County, Guangxi.

“The times they are a changing”….. Bob Dylan

Perhaps never before in history has a nation seen such rapid economic development and social change like China has in the past 25 years; “11.5% growth in the first three quarters of this year”, “foreign-exchange reserves of US$1.46 trillion”, “China to put man on the moon”. In economic size, China - the world's fastest-growing major economy - is surpassed only by the U.S., Japan, Germany, and France. This spectacular economic growth has contributed to an unprecedented rise in living standards, with an estimated 300 million Chinese lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years. more

Poverty Environment Network (PEN)
an international network and research project on poverty, environment and forest resources

The Poverty Environment Network (PEN) was launched in September 2004 by the Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR). The core of PEN is the tropics-wide collection of uniform socio-economic and environmental data at household and village levels by about 30 PEN partners (mainly PhD students), generating a global database with some 5-6 000 households and 200-250 villages from more than 20 countries. The data collection, which will continue until 2008, includes a careful recording of all forest and environmental uses, and all income data are collected through four quarterly surveys to shorten recall periods and increase accuracy. more

PEN flyer - a brief description of the PEN project

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