| Home > News & Events > PENEWS 2009-2 (August): Introducing RAVA: The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network |
PENEWS 2009-2 (August):
Introducing RAVA: The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network
CONTENT:
PEN updates
-
Data submission: 32 datasets have now been submitted, 18 have or will
soon be approved. The rest are undergoing checking.
-
PEN video: Production of a PEN short film is now underway, with the
commencement of preliminary editing of raw footage by CIFOR’s new video
editor, Tino. So far, we have received raw footage of PEN-related fieldwork
from Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, China and India. We are still accepting
footage to be included in the production, and strongly encourage PEN
partners or Associates to contribute if they can (we especially need more
footage from Africa, and action shots of forest harvesting and forest use).
Contact Nick (n.hogarth@cgiar.org) for more details.
-
XIII World Forestry Congress, 18–25 October 2009, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Life Sciences—in cooperation with
CIFOR—is hosting the PEN side event at the upcoming World Forestry Congress
(WFC), ‘Poverty Environment Network (PEN): assessing the role of tropical
forests in poverty alleviation’.
www.cfm2009.org/en/subseccion.asp?IdSeccion=138&IdSubseccion=359
The side event is the first international meeting presenting advanced
outcomes from the PEN research. The event will feature an overview of the
PEN project and presentation of results from six PEN partners in Africa,
Asia and Latin America, and discussion on the role of forests in poverty
alleviation. The panellists will be Amy Duchelle and Patricia Uberhaga
(Latin America), Marieve Pouliot and Beatrice Darko Obiri (Africa), Dararath
Yem and Nick Hogarth (Asia). Thanks to all PEN partners who submitted
abstracts for the side event, and congratulations to those selected. In
addition to presenting at the PEN side event, many other PEN partners have
also had abstracts accepted and will be attending the congress to present at
the main forum. PEN will also be presenting a poster providing an update on
the global PEN research progress at the main WFC poster session.
The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network (RAVA)
The Amazon Livelihood and Environment
Network (known as ‘RAVA’, its Spanish acronym), was formed in 2007 by the World
Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and other partner institutions within the Amazon
Initiative (AI) Consortium (including CIFOR). Using the PEN methodology, RAVA
analyses the living conditions of Amazonian communities to gain a better
understanding of the impact of forestry, agroforestry and agricultural
activities on the wellbeing of the communities and on the integrity of their
surrounding environment.
RAVA studies have been carried out across
14 sites in seven Amazonian countries, with each study location consisting of a
well-defined territory equivalent to one or more districts, or to an Amazonian
river basin home to communities that depend directly on the forest and its
products. In each RAVA site, a small research team typically includes a
professor from a local university, a postgraduate student, and a researcher or
technician from a local institution. To date, researchers have finished
collecting data in five of the seven countries, with site visits still occurring
in Venezuela and Suriname. A database comprising information from a total of
2200 households in almost 150 communities is currently being assembled through
the integration of data from the 14 surveys. In the coming months, RAVA teams
will be checking and cleaning the data already gathered and entered. There are
plans to produce an edited volume about RAVA research, as well as publications
aimed at sharing useful study results with the subject communities themselves.
RAVA receives financial support from the
World Bank’s Institutional Development Fund, with in-kind co-financing from
ICRAF, CIFOR and other AI member institutions. RAVA is also working closely with
PEN: RAVA is using an expanded PEN questionnaire, a common code list is
maintained, and two studies collect data for both projects. PEN Fellow Ronnie
Babigumira was the resource person for the third RAVA workshop in May 2009 (Belém,
Brazil), and the teams are now receiving online training in STATA through
modular sessions
Read the full story here:
www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/_ref/news/rava-brazil.htm
PEN project: Riyong Kim Bakkegaard (DRC): Forest and environmental income surrounding Luki Biosphere Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The PEN Democratic Republic of the
Congo (DRC) study was conducted in the lowland rainforest area surrounding
Luki Biosphere Reserve, Bas-Congo Province in western DRC. The reserve is
located approximately 120 km from the Atlantic coast and covers 32 968
hectares. Five villages surrounding the reserve were surveyed, and 193
households completed the year-long PEN survey in September 2008.
Forest income contributes 28 per cent of
household income, which varies between income quintiles and seasons. As
expected, forest dependence (or relative forest income (RFI) as measured by the
proportion of forest income over total income) decreased as total income
increased, although absolute forest income was higher for higher income
quintiles (Figure 1).
Figure 1. RFI and income quintiles, DRC 2007–08
Forest and environmental income ranked as
the biggest contributor to household income, followed by agricultural income,
although there were marked differences between income quintiles. Lower income
quintiles had higher forest and environmental income than crop income, but this
pattern was reversed in the upper income quintiles. Business was also a
significant income contributor in general, frequently reflecting the production
of a cassava product, chikuangue, traded in the capital, Kinshasa.
In terms of seasonality, the contribution
of forest income was higher during the wet season—reflecting the lean period,
when the rains promote a shift to intensive planting of agricultural crops.
During this period, forest products are in abundance and can be cashed in for
other products such as petrol and rice.
A familiar pattern emerges when looking at
products used for subsistence or cash—subsistence use of products was greater
among lower quintiles, than among higher quintiles (Figure 2). This is also
shown in the literature, as richer quintiles could have better access to
resources such as labour and money to buy harvesting technologies, networks to
market collected products, or crops which allow them to then harvest products
that fetch a greater cash value (or a combination of these).
Figure 2. Cash and subsistence (sub) shares by income quintile, DRC 2007–2008
The forest product most collected was by
far firewood (39%), followed by bush meat (16%) and charcoal (11%). The
proportion of firewood in total forest income was higher among lower quintiles
and not surprisingly 98% of it was used mainly for subsistence. In general, a
diversity of products was collected, from palm nut (Elaeis guineensis)
for the production of palm oil, to caterpillars, to eru (Gnetum africanum)
for sale to Kinshasa, with a greater diversity of products collected by higher
income quintiles (likely reflecting the better access to resources that allows
them to exploit more products).
This diversity and resource dependence is
hardly surprising as the country is rich in natural resources, housing the
largest of Africa’s forests. Nevertheless, DRC remains a land of ongoing
conflict. Thirty years of political mismanagement, two civil wars and continuing
ethnic unrest and human rights abuses in the eastern provinces has affected DRC
as a country, leaving its infrastructure, institutions and services seriously
wanting. The physical bottlenecks and unstable investment climate has deterred
the rate of natural resource exploitation, which has helped keep DRC’s huge
expanse of rainforest largely intact. However, these conditions have also meant
that the majority of people living in DRC continue to live in poverty and to
rely heavily on natural resources around them for their survival.
Good reading: Poverty, environmental income and rural inequality
From two of the intellectual godfathers
of PEN, we bring you: Poverty, environmental income and rural inequality: A case
study from Zimbabwe, by William Cavendish and Bruce Campbell. Although not (yet)
published in a peer-reviewed journal, this paper is a treasure trove of
information and inspiration for PEN partners and others working on the
forest–poverty nexus. Using a 213 household data set from rural Zimbabwe, the
authors quantitatively analysed the impact of environmental income on household
welfare and inequality.
The paper goes beyond the standard
methods, and uses a wide range of inequality measures. The authors conclude that
environmental income has a substantial equalising effect on income distribution,
and failure to account for this income will lead to exaggeration of rural
inequality. The paper also provides clear definitions of consumption, income,
poverty and inequality as used in the study. Many studies fail to do this,
making their relevance hard to determine or comparisons with other studies
problematic.
Can an activity both have a pro-poor
profile and also be a pathway out of poverty? No, the authors suggest.
Enrichment activities have high entry barriers (upfront costs), which create
rents (extra profit). But these barriers make them outside the reach of the
asset-constrained poor. The poor have access only to activities with low entry
costs, but due to the ease of access and the associated competition, profit
margins are minimal. How to break this vicious circle is a key to poverty
reduction, and many poor are still looking for that key.
The full article is available at:
www.cifor.cgiar.org/miombo/docs/Environmental_IncomeInequality.pdf
PENroach: Capture it: A few screen capture solutions
A colleague was preparing a PowerPoint presentation and needed to
insert figures and charts from a number of digital sources—PDFs and
web pages—so she stopped by for some help. We found a solution but
it got me thinking that this may be something readers of PENews may
find useful.
For most cases (e.g. photos on a webpage), right click and Save
As will do; however, there are slightly complicated cases such as
extracting charts from PDFs, and taking a snapshot of a webpage.
Here are a few solutions (mostly MS Windows based and not exhaustive
by any means).
 Windows Print Screen Key (Prt Scr) takes a snapshot of your PC screen
and copies it to the clipboard. You can then paste (ctrl+v) it wherever you
want. Easy, no installation required, but it grabs everything on the screen,
so you will need an image editor to crop what you need.
 Adobe’s snapshot tool. If the content is in a PDF, use Adobe’s
snapshot tool to select a screen area and take a snapshot of it. Like Prt
Scr it saves to the clipboard. Freeware: There are a number of free and shareware solutions as well,
Commercial
If you know of any other good tools, please email us and let us know.
Arild Angelsen, PEN coordinator
Ronnie Babigumira, PEN Research Fellow
Nick Hogarth, PEN partner and consultant
|
Print Version | Sitemap | Contact us | FAQs 
