The Relationship between Marine Biodiversity Conservation and Poverty Alleviation in the Strategies of Rural Development in China

Shen, J.; Han, X.; Hou, Y.; Wu, J., and Wen, Y., 2015. The relationship between marine biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation in the strategies of rural development in China.

Biodiversity conservation and sustainable management of ecosystems should be included in eradicating poverty and achieving the internationally agreed goals related strategies. This study demonstrated the primary content of the Outline of Development-oriented Poverty Reduction for China's Rural Areas (DPRCRA). By employing the Participatory Rural Assessment approach, this study assesses the effectiveness of DPRCRA in improving the ecology, socio-economic conditions and biodiversity conservation, elaborating on the opportunities and challenges entailed in the outline strategy. Results indicated that the relationship between them was Poverty escalation cycle and Poverty alleviation cycle. The paper also discusses the role of developing appropriate institutional mechanisms to integrate conservation and development efforts from practitioners' perspective, to enable poverty alleviation and marine biodiversity conservation to succeed, and proposes a set of guiding suggestions for making policies on rural capacity building and enhancing compensation mechanism.