• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

What is the role of forests in helping people out of poverty? Debates have identified that forests play different roles. Depending on the situation, forests can be safety nets or poverty traps. Most of the discussions summarised here emphasise the link between forests and the economic sphere.

Collecting rubber in East Kalimantan. Photo by Michaela Haug.

Forests serve as safety nets for the most vulnerable during times of hardship, such as droughts or agriculture price collapses. People in forest areas may temporarily use alternative forest products to meet emergency needs when primary resources in their livelihood systems fail. The safety net function could provide for subsistence consumption (for example, by adding root crops, bush meat, vegetables and medicine) or for cash income. The durability of the safety nets is limited; although the forests can provide a buffer period to lessen the impact of a calamity, people probably cannot rely on the forests for long and must find other alternatives quickly.

Conversely, dependence on forest resources could also be seen as a poverty trap under certain conditions. This can occur when the poor are forced into marginal forest areas where the only products available to them have little value, or where they lack the capacity, assets or rights to take advantage of resources, so instead opt for livelihood strategies that allow survival in the short term, but that over the long term further degrade the resource. The result is a downward spiral of accelerated resource degradation and increasing poverty.

Forest-related activities can generate opportunities, or escape routes, for the poor. Timber, for example, can provide significant cash income, although only if families can overcome limited market access, unclear tenure rights, and elite capture. This does not necessarily bode well for forests, because once families start to earn higher incomes, they may decide to clear forest, preferring agriculture investment to forest-based livelihoods. However, there are other strategies, like the extraction of non-timber forest products, such as Brazil nut, rattan and natural rubber, that provide relatively good income without degrading the resource base. In the future, environmental services are likely to offer attractive opportunities for communities that have maintained their natural forest landscape.

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
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