Environment and natural resource management policy

Accelerating environmental degradation is eroding the natural asset base of poor rural people. About one billion extremely poor people, out of 1.4 billion, live in rural areas and about three quarters of them are dependent on agriculture and its related activities for their livelihoods.

Sustainable environment and natural resource management (ENRM) lies at the heart of delivering poverty reduction for these people. Poor rural people face a series of interconnected natural resource management challenges. They are in the front line of climate change impacts; the ecosystems and biodiversity on which they rely are increasingly degraded; their access to suitable agricultural land is declining in both quantity and quality; their forest resources are increasingly restricted and degraded; they produce on typically marginal rainfed land, with increased water scarcity; energy and agricultural input prices are on a rising long-term trend; and declining fish and marine resources threaten essential sources of income and nutrition.