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By David Kaimowitz
Forests currently contribute in many important ways to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Here follows my thinking on this, taking each Goal in turn.
Goal 1 - Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Target 1 is to halve the proportion of the population in extreme poverty. Collecting, processing, using and selling wild and semi-domesticated plants and animals provide a significant part of the livelihoods of most extremely poor people. Detailed household surveys frequently find that these people receive an average of more than 20% of their income from such sources. Typically between 15-30% of non-farm rural enterprises involve wood based activities.
Forest resources sometimes provide incomes that allow people to get out of poverty. Much more often they help families to keep from falling further into poverty. They provide seasonal employment and food when other options are not available, resources in periods of personal distress (e.g. sickness, death, crop failure) and social stress (e.g. war, economic crisis, and drought). Without this, other attempts to get families out of poverty will be short-lived, as people will accumulate in good periods, but then disaccumulate in the bad periods.
Approximately 340 million people live in forested regions. Of these some 50-60 million people are indigenous people. These tend to be among the poorest people in the world. Marginal, fragile and remote areas have made slower progress on poverty reduction and need specific attention if the MDGs are to be achieved.
Forest-related activities that can help achieve Target 1 include: 1) forest tenure reform, 2) providing financial, market and technical services for forest-based activities, 3) eliminating forestry regulations that discriminate against poor people, and focusing conservation efforts on plants and animals poor people rely on.
Target 2 is to halve the proportion of people that suffer from hunger. In 62 of the Least Developed Countries people rely on wild meat and locally captured fish for over 20% of their protein. Much of this animal protein is associated with forest ecosystems. In many places those protein sources are under threat.
Wild fruits and vegetables are an important source of vitamins and minerals particularly for women and children. They are used mostly by the poorest sectors. Forest famine foods are very important in periods of war, drought, and economic collapse.
The measures required to protect forest foods are similar to those required for the previous target. However, bushmeat requires particular efforts to promote sustainable community wildlife management and the development of alternative protein sources. In some cases humanitarian food aid can replace forest famine foods but it has not been welldocumented where this works and where it does not.
Goal 2 - Achieve universal primary education . Forests have no clear and direct relation to this Goal. Forested regions like other remote and marginal regions require particular attention in education investment.
Goal 3 - Promote gender equality and empower women. Target 4 is to eliminate gender equality in education. Forests have no direct relation to eliminating gender inequality in education. Women are heavily involved in the collection, sale and processing of fuelwood and non-timber forest products. Organizing women around these activities is often a good way to raise their status and political profile.
Goals 4 - Reduce child mortality, 5 - Improve maternal health, and 6 - Combat HIV / AIDS, malaria and other diseases. I will discuss these Goals together. In the mid- 1980s, WHO estimated that some two billion people relied on medicinal plants and animals as their primary source of medicine. No more recent global estimate exists. Nor has there been any global assessment of the overall effectiveness of medicinal plants and animals and the traditional medical systems associated with them in addressing public health concerns. (There are, of course, thousands of studies on the efficacy of specific products.) Similarly, there are no good global overviews that review what portion of the medicinal plants and animals come from home gardens and domestic production, from semi-managed environments or from more natural environments. We do know that a large portion of medicinal plants and animals come from forests. We have only a limited knowledge of the conservation status of those plants and animals. Some countries have excellent policies and programs to fully integrate traditional medicine into their overall health approaches - China being the most obvious example. Given that most extremely poor people will have little access to western medical facilities for the foreseeable future, understanding more about what these traditional medical systems can and cannot do, and what opportunities and threats they pose, is urgent.
Examples of possible useful interventions include: tree domestication of medicinal plants, community management of medicinal plants and animals, conservation measures to protect medicinal plants and animals, training of traditional healers to improve their effectiveness, and the incorporation of traditional health care into public health planning efforts.
Land use affects many vector borne diseases, including malaria. The introduction of logging often promotes malaria because of the tendency to disturb the soil and leave stagnant areas of water. In other cases deforestation can reduce vector borne diseases. The links between land use and disease requires significant additional research.
Goal 7 - Ensure environmental sustainability . Target 9 is to integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources. The links between forests and this Target are pretty self-evident. Poverty Reduction Strategies, Country Assistance Strategies and similar mechanisms require more attention to forests and the environment. In many cases that will require significant additional data collection and the development of best practices for forestrelated investments. To reverse the loss of forest resources will require specific efforts to promote more environmentally friendly patterns of development at the regional level, as well as a mixture of regulatory and incentive mechanisms.
Target 10 is to halve the proportion of people without access to sustainable drinking water. Forests play a key role in maintaining water quality in rural areas and possibly in some urban areas as well. They filter the water to reduce the amount of silt, chemicals, and faecal material reaching the water supplies and simply having a forest next to the sources of water means that other polluting activities are avoided there. This has been well documented in terms of the processes involved, but not very welldocumented in terms of the numbers of people involved and the economic value of this hydrological service.
In some cases forests may also help maintain stream flow - and hence rural water availability - during the dry season. But despite all of the rhetoric about forests serving as a “sponge” we know remarkably little about this, and it may be more myth than fact. Forests and other land uses that allow significant infiltration of water deep into the ground are essential to maintain major aquifers. This is particularly important for urban water uses. The main threat in these cases is often that the forest will be replaced by roads and urban construction, which does not allow any water to infiltrate into the aquifer. This area requires watershed projects focused specifically on ensuring the availability of drinking water. Additional hydrological research is also required.
Target 11 is to achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million urban slum dwellers. There is only a rather indirect link between forests and this target.
Goal 8 - Develop a Global Partnership for Development . There are no strong links between forests and the aspirations developed within this Goal.
What does all this amount to? In my view, forests underpin many of the main ways in which the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved. But to come good on this promise, governments must adopt appropriate policy reforms, donors must increase their support, and civil society organizations must support forest-based micro-enterprises much more vigorously.
Further information:
David Kaimowitz
(former Director General CIFOR)
Ford Foundation , Mexico City
Mexico
Email: d.kaimowitz@fordfound.org