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Advancing biodiversity through poverty solutions

Nature Sustainability (2026) Cite this article

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Abstract

Forests provide several ecosystem services that support the livelihoods of millions of forest-dependent people in lower- and middle-income countries. Provisioning of ecosystem services is directly linked to the maintenance of forest biodiversity, which in turn is influenced by human activities. We leveraged a unique dataset of plot-level tree species data from 322 tropical community forests to analyse the joint effects of demographic, socioeconomic and institutional factors on forest biodiversity, as such impacts have been rarely assessed simultaneously. We find that percentage of poor households and community reliance on fuelwood are associated with lower richness. Over time, forests in areas with higher population density and increasing numbers of poor households experienced declines in local species richness, with dominant species being the most affected. In contrast, forests in areas where households have increased their reliance on subsistence crops are associated with positive changes in species richness and these changes took place across rare, common and dominant species. Social and institutional factors (livestock presence and governance arrangements) showed no association with species richness losses or gains over time. Our analyses suggest that interventions aimed at reducing poverty may create positive effects on community forest diversity and thus on the ecosystem services these forests provide.

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Fig. 1: Map of study locations.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2: Analytical framework linking SARs to socioecological and governance factors.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 3: Socioeconomic and governance determinants of species accumulation.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 4: Socioeconomic change and rare, common and abundant tree species dynamics.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

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Data availability

IFRI dataset is publicly available for analysis. The IFRI dataset can be downloaded from https://www.forestlivelihoods.org/ifri-dataset/. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The JAGS code used to estimate SAR parameters and to analyse variation in SAR parameters is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18685850 (ref. 69).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Collaborating Research Centers and researchers who have contributed to ongoing data collection within the IFRI network. N.P. conducted this research while he was affiliated with the School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan. J.A.O. was funded by UKRI Frontier Research (grant no. EP/X023222/1), selected by the European Research Council.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pulte Institute for Global Development, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Nabin Pradhan & Arun Agrawal

  2. Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Nabin Pradhan & Arun Agrawal

  3. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Inés Ibáñez

  4. Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India

    Ashwini Chhatre

  5. Yale School of Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Apurva Duddu

  6. Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden

    Harry W. Fischer

  7. Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Peter Newton

  8. Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Johan A. Oldekop

  9. School of Environment, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Sarah J. Wilson

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  1. Nabin Pradhan
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  2. Inés Ibáñez
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  3. Ashwini Chhatre
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Contributions

N.P., I.I. and A.A. conceptualized the research. N.P. and I.I. conducted the data analysis. N.P., I.I. and A.A. wrote the paper. N.P., A.A., A.C., A.D., P.N. and S.J.W. contributed to the acquisition and preparation of the data. A.C., A.D., H.W.F., P.N., J.A.O. and S.J.W. interpreted the results, reviewed the paper and provided feedback.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nabin Pradhan.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Felipe Melo and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Pradhan, N., Ibáñez, I., Chhatre, A. et al. Advancing biodiversity through poverty solutions. Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01816-9

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