‘Often people have lamented that the poorest of the poor live on the edge of national parks, and the assumption is that it’s the parks that are keeping people poor,’ said Lisa Naughton, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This leads some people to say that they can’t afford to protect biodiversity if, by doing so, they will inflict further economic hardship on people who are already poor.

In order to explore the relationships among parks, poverty and biodiversity conservation, Naughton and colleagues began monitoring 252 families living within five kilometres of Kibale National Park, Uganda in 1996 over a period of ten years. They found that the general trend was toward greater prosperity, as measured by access to clean drinking water, livestock ownership, and living under an improved roof rather than the traditional thatch.

‘Most of the households came out ahead, are a lot better off than when we started,’ said Naughton. However, ten per cent of families sold or lost their land and moved away, an indication of severe poverty. But even then, the researchers results suggested that even more of these people’s very poor counterparts who lived further away were forced to sell or give up their land.

‘It’s misleading. If you look, you see more poor people living near the park. But when you look at the change in assets, you see that the poor people who live next to the park have lost less than poor people who live farther away,’ said one of the study’s co-authors, Jennifer Alix-Garcia.

October 2011