Our Mission

Taking care of the land and preserving biodiversity – through healthy soil, reliable water access and pollinators – is vital for providing livelihoods for rural populations, particularly during times of economic shock like that caused by the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Healthy ecosystems have been shown to provide a lifeline to the poorest. The Poverty Environment Network project that collects income data of forest adjacent communities from 24 countries, estimates that environmental income (most of it from the forest) represents 28 percent of total income of these households (Angelsen et al, 2014). Read More.

As countries around the world contend with the health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic effects of mitigation measures have immediately impacted the world’s commodity markets and are likely to continue to affect them in the longer term. 

The global economic shock of the pandemic has driven most commodity prices down and is expected to result in substantially lower prices over 2020, the April Commodity Markets Outlook reports. Here is a look at the outlook for commodity markets in six charts. View Charts

Over a decade, the share of the world’s population living in close proximity to conflict has nearly doubled to 3%. A new World Bank report highlights a sharp increase in the exposure to conflict in the Middle East and North Africa, from 6% in 2007 to almost 20% in 2017, with a steep increase in 2011.Read More.

At the turn of the millennium, 1 in 5 of the world's extreme poor lived in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS). Since then, poverty has fallen steadily in economies not in FCS, but the number of poor people in FCS continues to grow. As a result, about half the world’s poor reside in FCS today. If current trends continue, by 2030, FCS will account for just 10% of the global population but as many as two-thirds of the world’s poor. Read More.