The celebration of Earth Day (April 22) reminds us that all species, including Homo sapiens, share one common habitat: The earth.
Scientists have been raising alarms for years about how human activities have driven global biophysical conditions beyond multiple planetary boundaries. Recent studies warn of a number of related threats , including a global decline in insect populations, biodiversity loss, and a potentially deadly combination of factors including climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, deforestation, and acidifying oceans, which could result in disastrous consequences for humanity.
Reflecting on these alarming threats, we want to focus on the critical role of commons—shared resources including communal forests, grazing lands, wetlands, and bodies of water—in safeguarding a “safe and just operating space for humanity.” This is a space where we respect the limits of earth’s ecosystems while simultaneously addressing social and development objectives such as health, gender equality, social equality, and jobs.
At the global level, the commons have multiple, often under-appreciated benefits. In addition to providing a source of livelihoods for billions of people, forests provide essential carbon sequestration and climate regulation services; wetlands provide natural water quality improvement, flood protection, shoreline erosion control, and opportunities for recreation and aesthetic appreciation; rangelands provide wildlife corridors in addition to pastures for livestock.
Yet too often policies and programs neglect the commons. In India, commons include 60-80 million hectares of land and thousands of water bodies, support the livelihoods of more than 350 million people and provide essential ecosystem functions. A very partial 2001 estimate suggests that land-based commons contribute $5 billion to the income of poor Indian households, but the true value is not known and likely much larger, the study authors say. Despite these vital contributions, Indian policy makers tend to perceive the commons as “wastelands,” and the rights of local communities as custodians of these resources are not recognized adequately.
What can researchers, development practitioners, and policy makers do?
The diverse values of the commons should be made more “visible” and accounted for in decision-making. Research that maps, values, and models ecosystem services is needed to help us understand where their benefits lie. This includes data and analyses on economic and other benefits, on who receives them (such as gender breakdowns), and on the interactions and interconnections among species and across land use types. Such information can influence public awareness and societal mindsets, inform policies, and form a strong evidence-based foundation for public and private investment in protecting and/or restoring commons.
The most challenging question is about putting these values into action: How local communities, civil society, researchers, private and public sector can work together to safeguard the sustainability of the commons. This process is likely to be bumpy. In a recent interview, renowned agricultural economist David Zilberman points out that necessity is the mother of adoption of invention: Often, it takes a disaster to trigger recognition of a problem and the adoption of new technologies. Research that reveals the values of the commons can help head off disaster by justifying the “necessity” of considering the consequences of local choices on the broader society, and of today’s choices on future options.
One key priority is to step up action research—applying findings in tools that local communities, governments, and NGOs can use for improving the governance of commons on a wide scale. For example, we have promising results in applying collective action “games” to strengthen communities’ cooperation for managing water resources .
In the groundwater game, participants in India played out various individual groundwater management scenarios—choosing whether to grow “Crop A” that required little water and generated a modest income, or a thirstier “Crop B” that produced higher income. The consequences of individual decisions on the group—and the need for cooperative decision-making—became clear: If they all picked Crop A, the water table was sustainable; the more people chose Crop B, the faster the water table fell.
The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a NGO partner of IFPRI and other CGIAR centers in the work on commons management in India since 2005, has since piloted this approach in over 200 communities (reaching approximately 14,000 households) and is ready to go to scale. FES is the ideal scaling lead because they are already present in 16,409 communities, supporting local water, grazing, and forest management. FES’s new Promise of Commons (PoC) Initiative aims to reach up to 90,000 communities by 2023, both directly and indirectly, by working with other NGOs and government agencies. These programs offer reasons for hope on Earth Day. Using our research to empower local communities and individual agents of change will be key to solving the complex and dangerous challenges confronting the global commons.
Wei Zhang is a Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Environment and Production Technology Division (EPTD) and the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE). Ruth Meinzen-Dick is an EPTD Senior Research Fellow.
