The PEN Team
Knowledge frontiers on poverty-forest linkages
PROFOR, World Bank, 3rd October 2014
PEN: How global-comparative data
challenges conventional wisdom

THINKING beyond the canopy
PEN is…
Large, tropics-wide collection of detailed & high-quality &
comparable data by PhD students on the poverty-forest
(environment) nexus, coordinated by CIFOR, with
numerous partners
It is the most comprehensive analysis of poverty-forest
linkages undertaken to date

Features of PEN
 Approach: a network
• PhD students: Long fieldwork
& student engagement
• Supported by senior resource
persons
• Mutual benefits
 Capacity building
• Majority of partners from
developing countries
 State-of-the-art methods
• Quality data – short recall
• Comparable methods
• Methods summarised in a
2011 book

THINKING beyond the canopy
PEN: the numbers..
 24 countries
 38 PEN studies
 239 households in the average study
 364 villages or communities surveyed
 >8,000 households surveyed
 40,950 household visits by PEN enumerators
 2,313 data fields (variables) in the average study
 294,150 questionnaire pages filled out and entered
 456,546 data cells (numbers) in the average study
 17,348,734 data cells in the PEN global data base!

The PEN data set

PEN sample: a delicate balance
 Criteria for site selection:
• Within a tropical or sub-tropical developing region,
• Some access to forests (0 < forest cover < 100%)
 Site selection was opportunistic (PhD students) – with
some posterior gap-filling (e.g. West Africa, Vietnam)
 Within sites: stratified village selection (along pre-
defined gradients), random HH selection in villages
 Broadly representative of smallholder-dominated
tropical and sub-tropical landscapes with moderate-to-
good access to forest resources.
 Probably a slight bias toward areas with “good forests”
(vis-á-vis “rural developing world” baseline)

PEN methods and approaches
Research tools are online:
http://www.cifor.org/pen
 Summarized in Angelsen et al.
(eds.) 2011 book (available for
free download from CIFOR
website)
 PEN prototype questionnaires
available in eight languages
 ESRC (UK) positive evaluation
2012: “methods and capacity
building may be more
important than actual PEN
results”

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3
income shares
other
environment
business
livestock
wages
forest
crops
Source: CIFOR-PEN dataset
Income sources in the PEN dataset
~22%
~6.4%
T = 27.5%
=> Clearly supports “high env. income” hypothesis
– …much more than some of us had thought! 

Income share from forests and environment
(not country representative!)
sample mean=0.28
0 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1
Cameroon
Zambia
Nigeria
Bolivia
Brazil
Congo, Dem. Rep.
Mozambique
Peru
Cambodia
China
Ethiopia
Uganda
Ghana
Bangladesh
Burkina Faso
Malawi
India
Belize
Ecuador
Indonesia
Senegal
Guatemala
Vietnam
Nepal
forest and environmental income other sources

Forest and environmental income
shares by product type
Forest income (%) Other environmental
income (%)
Food 20.9 39.6
Fuel 37.2 21.8
Structural and
fiber
33.3 15.5
Medicines,
resins and dyes
5.1 5.8
Other 3.5 17.3 (fodder)
Total 100 100

15.3 7.5
13.0 8.3
11.5 8.9
10.0 9.5
9.1 9.9
0 5 10 15 20 25
Forest income share (%)
Bottom 20%
20-40%
40-60%
60-80%
Top 20%
Forest reliance by income quintile, global
Subsistence Cash
Forest and environmental income
shares by wealth status

• Gender: Men generated at least as
much forest income as women do
(with product variations)
• Shocks: Forests less important as
“safety nets” and “gap fillers” than
portrayed in case-study literature
(other priority responses key)
• Tenure: more income from state
than private or community forests
(absolutely and per-ha)
• Deforestation: The poorest farmers
(“they cut because they must”) clear
much less forest than smallholder
middle class (investment motives)
Other myth-busting findings

 Peer-reviewed journal
articles: >50
 Books: 1
 Book chapters/sections: 7
 Conference papers &
presentations: >100
 PhD theses: >15
 Masters theses: 4
 Working papers & reports: 6
 Newsletters & bulletins: 26
 Policy briefs: 2
PEN-related publications

World Development Special Issue
Free download online: www.cifor.org/pen

1. Analysis of fuelwood & charcoal in rural livelihoods (Univ. N. Carolina)
2. Migration, land-cover & climate change (Wageningen).
3. Local tenure institutions and forest benefit sharing (Univ. of Colorado
at Boulder).
4. Local tenure institutions, forest product types, and income share
(e.g. poor, ethnic minorities, women etc.) (University of Alberta).
6. Theoretical model on safety-net uses of NTFPs (Columbia Univ.).
7. What share of hh nutrition comes from forest foods at PEN sites?
(CIFOR)
8. Relative importance of forest and non-forest food supply (Univ.
Copenhagen).
9. Safety net response strategies to different types of shocks (ZEF-
Bonn)
10. WB 2015 report: Climate Change & Poverty – CIFOR analysis PEN &
climate data (CIFOR)
11. How useful are environmental service models for decision making?
(University of Southampton).
Further analyses: CIFOR & partners

 Not without a big startup
grant!
 Sentinel sites discussion:
larger scale, more
extensive interest field
(mismatch).
 “Would you do PEN again?”
Angelica Almeyda, PEN
PhD student: “Yes, but
only in the past!”
Gathering more PEN (panel) data?

Outcomes & impact pathways
• Help World Bank and
statistical bureaus engaged
in Living Standard
Measurement Surveys
(LSMS) to do a better job in
(environmental) ‘bean
counting’…
• Joint project working with
FAO, World Bank, PROFOR,
IFRI, Univ. Copenhagen:
develop forestry module for
LSMS.
• CIFOR pilot testing new
forestry module in Indonesia
(+Tanzania), Oct 2014

 Environmental income is
key for rural small-holders
in developing world is
central claim: what policy
impact?
 But what is PEN non-
random sample really
representative of? So
much tropics-wide variation
 Are PEN results arguments
for conservation?
Perhaps, but not if
forestland is abundant
Final perspectives

The role of extractive incomes
“More than 10,000 years
after the agricultural
revolution, millions of
rural smallholders across
the developing world may
still derive as much
income from foraging
forests and wildlands as
from cultivating crops”
(Wunder, et al.World Development 2014)