Tropical forests in poverty alleviation: from household data to global-comparative analysis

Forests are crucial to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of poor people worldwide, but just how important, and for what functions? Can they help lift people out of poverty, or are they mainly useful as gap-fillers and safety nets in response to shocks? Are certain types of forest-tenure and management regimes more favourable than others? And under what conditions can increased integration into forest-product markets help? These are the questions to be answered by this tropics-wide, multi-partner research project. In the Poverty and Environment Network (PEN) consortium, led by the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), around 30 partners (mostly PhD students) gather quantitative and qualitative socioeconomic data using the same questionnaire in all three developing-country continents to illuminate the role of forests and environmental income in preventing and reducing rural poverty. A centrally coordinated pan-tropical data bank with high-quality primary household and village data is being created for the global-comparative analysis. DFID-ESRC kindly finances those PEN research components related to data-bank establishment, global analysis, publication of scientific outputs, and the dissemination of policy recommendations for tangible forest-poverty interventions.