We examine the environmental impacts of a cash transfer program in rural Zambia and investigate whether variation in market access is associated with heterogeneous impacts on natural resource use. We consider households’ use of firewood, charcoal, bushmeat and land for farming, as well as their ownership of non-farm businesses. We find that cash transfers increase the likelihood of charcoal consumption as well as the amount consumed for those living close to paved roads. The transfers also enable households to increase the size of their farms and establish non-farm businesses. These impacts are most pronounced for those living far from paved roads. While remoteness is associated with farm expansion in response to the cash transfer, more education causes those receiving the transfer to decrease the size of their farms. This impact heterogeneity has important implications for sustainable development.

Decision-makers need readily accessible tools to understand the potential impacts of alternative policies on forest cover and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to develop effective policies to meet national and international targets for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Land change modelling can support policy decisions by demonstrating potential impacts of policies on future deforestation and GHG emissions. We modelled land change to explore the potential impacts of expert-informed scenarios on deforestation and GHG emissions, specifically CO2 emissions, in the Ankeniheny–Zahamena Corridor in eastern Madagascar. We considered four scenarios: business as usual; effective conservation of protected areas; investment in infrastructure; and agricultural intensification. Our results highlight that effective forest conservation could deliver substantial emissions reductions, while infrastructure development will likely cause forest loss in new areas. Agricultural intensification could prevent additional forest loss if it reduced the need to clear more land while improving food security. Our study demonstrates how available land change modelling tools and scenario analyses can inform land-use policies, helping countries reconcile economic development with forest conservation and climate change mitigation commitments.

Non-contributory pensions have become extremely popular in the last decade, with 78 developing countries currently distributing money in this way, and their acclaimed impacts are increasingly celebrated. Studies have found them to contribute not only to ‘obvious’ needs such as increased consumption and income security but also to investments in productivity, social relationships, health, increased access to credit and savings, while it has become common to claim that they contribute to intangible goals such as dignity and citizenship. The danger of some of these claims is that they assume that wellbeing is heavily responsive to monetary wealth, rather than other areas. To study this, an ethnographic methodology, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, was employed in two rural communities located in the La Paz department in the highland Altiplano region of Bolivia close to Lake Titicaca. Our analysis shows that while the Renta Dignidad increases older persons’ livelihood security, its contributions to other areas where non-contributory pensions are claimed to have major impacts, such as productive investment, health care and relational wellbeing, are actually relatively limited. The policy implication of this is that a more integral approach needs to be adopted to older persons' wellbeing, going beyond cash transfers to greater efforts to bring health-care services to older people in remote rural areas.

Mali’s 2012 coup d’état and subsequent rebellion created much hardship for those living in the northern and southern parts of the country. This article explores the changes that occurred during the period of uncertainty in the country, the role of the minimalist state, and the implications of these conditions for future development initiatives. The way in which Mali muddled through the 2012–2013 period has left two distinct aid landscapes: a heavily militarized northern region where aid from donors is focused on antiterrorism, and a southern zone of free-market intervention facilitated by donors.

We provide a review of sustainable coffee certifications and results from a quantitative analysis of the effects of Fair Trade, organic and combined Fair Trade/organic certifications on the livelihood strategies of 469 households and 18 cooperatives of Central America and Mexico. Certified households were also compared with a non-certified group in each country. To analyze the differences in coffee price, volume, gross revenue and education between certifications, we used the Kruskal–Wallis (K–W) non-parametric test and the Mann–Whitney U non-parametric test as a post-hoc procedure. Household savings, credit, food security and incidence of migration were analyzed through Pearson's chi-square test. Our study corroborated the conditions of economic poverty among small-scale coffee farmer households in Central America and Mexico. All certifications provided a higher price per pound and higher gross coffee revenue than non-certified coffee. However, the average volumes of coffee sold by individual households were low, and many certified farmers did not sell their entire production at certified prices. Certifications did not have a discernable effect on other livelihood-related variables, such as education, and incidence of migration at the household level, although they had a positive influence on savings and credit. Sales to certified markets offer farmers and cooperatives better prices, but the contribution derived from these premiums has limited effects on household livelihoods. This demonstrates that certifications will not single-handedly bring significant poverty alleviation to most coffee-farming families. Although certified coffee markets alone will not resolve the livelihood challenges faced by smallholder households, they could still contribute to broad-based sustainable livelihoods, rural development and conservation processes in coffee regions. This can be done by developing more active partnerships between farmers, cooperatives, certifications and environmental and rural development organizations and researchers in coffee regions. Certifications, especially Fair Trade/organic, have proven effective in supporting capacity building and in serving as networks that leverage global development funding for small-scale coffee-producing households.

When compared to tropical forest zones in west and central Africa, off-take of wild meat from savannah and grassland biomes by local rural communities has not been well assessed. This case study of wild meat collection activities within a rural community in the Mount Frere region of the Eastern Cape (South Africa) uses last-catch records derived from 50 wild meat gatherers to calculate average off-take of taxa, species and fresh mass of wild meat per collection event. When per-event off take is overlaid onto household hunting frequency data, annual off-take would be 268.6 kg km−2 yr−1 or 3 kg person−1 yr−1 presuming constant off-take over an annual period. Monetary value of off-take would be South African R 307 (US$ 39) per household annually. For some species, off-take weight per km2 shows similar values to data from tropical forest zones, but high human population densities tend to dilute off-takes to less nutritionally significant amounts at the per person scale. However, unlike many tropical zones, none of the species harvested can be considered high-priority conservation species. Even densely populated and heavily harvested communal lands appear to offer high wild meat off-takes from low conservation priority species.

Six distinct market samples of Dacryodes edulis (safou/African plum) with different fruit colour were characterized in terms of morphological, sensory and nutritional traits that can guide the selection of high-value individual trees for cultivar development. The morphological characteristics assessed were: fruit length, fruit width, fruit and flesh weights, flesh thickness and pulp/fruit ratio, while the sensory characteristics were: acidity, aroma astringency, bitterness, oiliness, preference, fibrousness and sourness. In addition, the biochemical composition (carbohydrates, ash, protein, lipids, dietary fibres, vitamin C, iron, calcium and phosphorus contents) was determined. These attributes all showed great variability, suggesting their importance in the identification of multi-trait ideotypes for potential cultivar development.

The Amazon basin is a key supplier of wild freshwater fishes to the multi-billion US$ global aquarium market, yet limited information exists on the organization of the regional trade, its importance to local economies or conservation impacts. Through field interviews and review of government statistics, this paper describes the state of the industry in Peru, reporting on the scale and value of the trade, the nature of the fishery and the characteristics and roles of key actors in regional supply networks. An economically important industry is revealed, with 28 firms officially exporting over nine million fishes worth US$ 2.5 million to 24 countries in 2001, and involving fish species from 36 families transported from rainforest catchments up to 1100 km distant from the export centre of Iquitos. Most fish are however collected close to the city, with 10 species representing >70% of trade volume. Some 10 000 people earn income from the trade, among them many rural poor who depend on aquarium fish collection as a primary or supplementary source of cash income. The industry is currently undergoing an important transition towards supplying new Asian and European markets, increasing exports of species biologically unsuited to heavy exploitation as a result, and highlighting the conservation need for improved knowledge and management of the trade in Amazonia.