BIORIGHTS:
The Conservation Paradigm for Poverty Alleviation

(A Publication from
South Asian Forum for Environment)

CONCEPT NOTE

BIORIGHTS is an innovative concept of sustainable development for conserving valuable but vulnerable ecosystems along with poverty alleviation in global south. It tries to protect areas of global environmental importance by compensating poor people who live near nature areas and are dependent on these nature areas for cash generating activities. The hypothesis is that in this way a sustainable rural development is possible as the negative link between poverty and nature degradation will disappear. Developing countries of global south may find it as an attractive solution to reach the Millennium Development Goals for 2015, which state that extreme poverty has to be decreased by 50%, but adopting the innovation in making a feasible and reproducible model many aspects of the environment and its economics need to be reviewed.

South Asian Forum has the onus of successfully completing India 's first Biorights Project in East Kolkata Wetlands which has been handed over to the fishermen community in the World Wetlands Day 2009. In an attempt to highlight the integral facets of BIORIGHTS as a financial tool for both poverty alleviation and environmental sustainable development, South Asian Forum for Environment plans to come out with a valued publication in the form of a book entitle “BIORIGHTS: The Conservation Paradigm for Poverty Alleviation” [ISBN 978-81-908391-0-5] edited by Dr Dipayan Dey, to initiate a discussion on the green dais with inputs from scholars, researcher, eminent economists and environmentalists along with case studies from different corners of the nation and global south to rummage around the viability of this concept. We have got tremendous response from all countries of South Asia, China, Philippines and Tanzania.