杏吧原创

A poverty alleviation programme has been linked with reducing forest loss in Indonesian villages by nearly a third, in a country with .

The Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), which started dispersing money directly to poor households in 2008, wasn鈥檛 designed for conservation. However, researchers found evidence linking it to lower rates of deforestation in the villages where people received the payments.

鈥淲e find that both environmental and poverty alleviation goals can be achieved under certain conditions,鈥� says Rhita Simorangkir at the National University of Singapore.

Working with Paul Ferraro at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, she looked at satellite data on forest cover near almost 7500 villages in which people received funds between 2008 and 2012. The pair discovered that forest loss was 30 per cent down in villages that received the money earlier, compared with similar PKH-eligible villages that didn鈥檛 receive the money until later.

The actual forest area saved is relatively small, at 5.5 hectares per year for each village. But Simorangkir says even marginal gains are welcome, and notes that around half the forest saved is primary forest. Retaining such untouched forest can make it harder for large-scale farmers to light the vast fires that blight the country鈥檚 forests each year, she adds.

Fred Stolle at the US-based Global Forest Watch points out that primary forest stores more carbon than other forests and is richer in biodiversity. show that, globally, a football pitch-sized area of primary forest was lost every 6 seconds in 2019. Stolle says the Indonesia study has 鈥渕ajor implications for tropical forest countries battling poverty in the rural forest frontier and high deforestation鈥�.

Simorangkir and Ferraro think there are two reasons the PKH has a side effect of cutting deforestation. First, it provides some financial insurance, meaning subsistence farmers don鈥檛 have to clear more forest for income in years with bad weather. Second, these farmers buy goods from elsewhere rather than making them out of materials from the nearby forest. The deforestation doesn鈥檛 appear to be displaced: the researchers found no evidence of spikes in nearby villages.

Previous research has found that , as they led to more land being cleared for cattle ranching. But Simorangkir says her work suggests that doesn鈥檛 appear to be the case for Indonesia, and probably other countries in the region too: 鈥淲e think other Asian countries with forest might have similar stories like Indonesia.鈥�