Parks & Poverty
It’s a pattern seen throughout the developing world: Poor communities clustered around the edges of national parks. To some scholars, it’s a sign that parks are “poverty traps” that help keep people poor. A new long-term study from Uganda, however, disputes that idea.
“There is a lot of research looking at poverty in parks, but much of it amounts to looking just at the present-day location of poverty,” says geographer Lisa Naughton-Treves of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), the lead author of the study, which appears in a special section of the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences focused on biodiversity conservation and poverty. In contrast, her team spent a decade - from 1996 to 2006 - studying the changing fortunes of 252 families living near Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Then, using statistical techniques to combine field data with land-use trends gathered from satellite images, the team was able to answer some basic questions, Naughton-Treves says: “What were the starting conditions? What were the ending conditions? And did the park matter?”
The general trend, they report, was toward greater prosperity, as measured by access to clean drinking water, ownership of more livestock, 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-Treves, who has worked in Uganda for more than 20 years. “I go back every couple of years, and people are generally optimistic, some say they never imagined life would be this good.”