Implications of Livelihood Dependence on Non-Timber Products in Peruvian Amazonia

The present and future well-being of the world’s forest dwelling populations depends on their ability to gain livelihood resources from their immediate environment. Sustainable extraction of non-timber forest products has been promoted by conservationists and development agencies as a feasible strategy for forest dwellers that does not compromise the resource base. Yet surveys of actual resource use suggest that for poorer resource-dependent communities without access to markets, non-timber forest products can only ever represent a safety-net activity and a supplementary income source. Others argue that resource availability, in terms of the diversity and productivity of the forest, is the key parameter in realizing a contribution of forest products to well-being. This paper examines the scope and heterogeneity of forest product use to reveal whether resource availability necessarily provides the context for significant contributions to well-being of forest dwellers. We present data from an area of tropical rainforest, close to Iquitos in Peru, which was previously shown to have high potential value. We find, through a census survey of households within a forest reserve area, that non-timber forest products provide only a relatively small portion of income and that only a small proportion of available products are actually commercialized, despite apparent market availability. We show that the low rates of commercialization can be explained by unequal access capital assets used for extraction, to natural resources themselves, and to product markets. They are also explained by the concentration of capital-poor households on subsistence gathering activities. The value of destructive uses of forests, both logging and agriculture, remain higher than returns from non-timber products. This research demonstrates that although non-timber forest products are an important livelihood source, market integration and commercialization is not everywhere an appropriate or realistic strategy.     

Structural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region

Adaptation, as a strategy to respond to climate change, has limits: there are conditions under which adaptation strategies fail to alleviate impacts from climate change. Research has primarily focused on identifying absolute bio-physical limits. This paper contributes empirical insight to an emerging literature on the social limits to adaptation. Such limits arise from the ways in which societies perceive, experience and respond to climate change. Using qualitative data from multi-stakeholder workshops and key-informant interviews with representatives of the fisheries and tourism sectors of the Great Barrier Reef region, we identify psycho-social and structural limits associated with key adaptation strategies, and examine how these are perceived as more or less absolute across levels of organisation. We find that actors experience social limits to adaptation when: i) the effort of pursuing a strategy exceeds the benefits of desired adaptation outcomes; ii) the particular strategy does not address the actual source of vulnerability, and; iii) the benefits derived from adaptation are undermined by external factors. We also find that social limits are not necessarily more absolute at higher levels of organisation: respondents perceived considerable opportunities to address some psycho-social limits at the national-international interface, while they considered some social limits at the local and regional levels to be effectively absolute.     

Governance in the Face of Extreme Events: Lessons from Evolutionary Processes for Structuring Interventions,and the Need to Go Beyond

Ecosystems - The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century"...     

Introduction: integrating genetic and cultural evolutionary approaches to language

The papers in this special issue of Human Biology address recent research in the field of language evolution, both the genetic evolution of the language faculty and the cultural evolution of specific languages. While both of these areas have received increasing interest in recent years, there is also a need to integrate these somewhat separate efforts and explore the relevant gene-culture coevolutionary interactions. Here we summarize the individual contributions, set them in the context of the wider literature, and identify outstanding future research questions. The first set of papers concerns the comparative study of nonhuman communication in primates and birds from both a behavioral and neurobiological perspective, revealing evidence for several common language-related traits in various nonhuman species and providing clues as to the evolutionary origin and function of the human language faculty. The second set of papers discusses the consequences of viewing language as a culturally evolving system in its own right, including claims that this removes the need for strong genetic biases for language acquisition, and that phylogenetic evolutionary methods can be used to reconstruct language histories. We conclude by highlighting outstanding areas for future research, including identifying the precise selection pressures that gave rise to the language faculty in ancestral hominin species, and determining the strength, domain specificity, and origin of the cultural transmission biases that shape languages as they pass along successive generations of language learners.