Strategies for Strengthening Community Property Rights Over Forests
Lessons and Opportunities for Practitioners
By Andy White, and Alejandra Martin - Forest Trends, Forest Trends View PublicationTenure security has recently become a central concern of poverty, forest conservation and human rights advocates alike. Poverty experts now recognize that the world’s poor are disproportionately located in rural areas and strongly dependent upon forest resources for their survival. Recent studies indicate that about 80 percent of the extreme poor, those living on less than one dollar a day, depend on forest resources for their livelihoods. One billion people depend almost entirely on forests for their medicinal resources and about the same number depend on forests for their fuel needs. The poor are also directly dependent on the many ecosystem services of forests, particularly watershed services and biodiversity.