This document summarizes some of CIFOR's research on poverty, livelihoods, and forests. It finds that environmental income from forests remains overlooked in poverty reduction strategies. Tools to assess poverty and income often fail to capture the importance of income from natural resources. As a result, the value of forests to rural livelihoods and food security has been invisible or misunderstood. The Poverty and Environment Network's research across 24 countries and over 8,000 households found that income from natural forests accounts for about 28% of total household income. Forests are less important as "safety nets" than previously believed. State forests generate more income than private or community forests, and the poorest farmers play a modest role in forest clearing

1. Poverty, Livelihoods, and Forests:
Some highlights of CIFOR’s research
Christine Padoch

2. Rural Livelihoods and Forests:
Still an important gap
 “Environmental income” remains widely overlooked by
policymakers in their poverty reduction strategies.
 Existing tools that assess poverty & income — e.g.
poverty reduction strategy plans, the World Bank’s
Living Standard Measurement Study Surveys (LSMS),
national income accounting systems — often fail to
adequately capture the importance of income from
natural resources.
 Thus the value of forests to the livelihoods (including
food security) of the world’s rural poor has remained
largely invisible or misunderstood
 And situations are rapidly changing; what we know or
think we know needs to be updated.

3. Poverty and Environment Network
“More than 10,000
years after the
Agricultural
Revolution started,
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. 2014)

4. Poverty and Environment Network
(PEN)
 24 countries
 33 PhD students
 58 sites
 240 households in the average study
 333 villages or communities surveyed
 ~8,000 households
 40,950 household visits by PEN enumerators
 >17 million data cells in PEN global data base
 The largest quantitative, global-comparative
research project on forests & rural livelihoods
to date

5. PEN Field Sites

6.  Income from natural forests & other natural areas
~28% of total household income (actually higher than
the contribution of cropping).
 Significant gender differentiation in the collection of
forest products, but men generated at least as much
income from forests as women.
 Forests are less important as “safety nets” than
previously believed.
 State forests generated more income than private or
community forests.
 The poorest farmers play only a modest role in forest
clearing.
 Joint project working with World Bank, FAO, IFRI and
others to strengthen forest and environmental income
data collection in the World Bank’s LSMS surveys.
Some Important Findings/Impact

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

8. People in Motion: Forests in Transition:
Demographic shifts are changing rural communities
• Difficulty of applying earlier data and definitions: multiple
differences with Euro-N. American “forest transitions”
• Large variations within regions and nations; indications of
greater mobility (temporary movement) rural-rural, rural-
urban, urban-urban and urban-rural
• Great diversity of rural-urban linkages, diverse forms of
migration and residence; multilocality of households,
elements of survival and accumulation livelihood strategies
• Variations in who migrates, where, who gets left behind,
changes in gender and age structure, costs of labor, with
implications for forests and livelihoods
• Migration and remittances will be increasingly important,
how to make them work for the benefit of sustainable
landscapes, households and communities.