Peasant Adaptation to Environmental Change

One of the primary challenges facing researchers and practitioners in their efforts to address issues of poverty and environment is the need to deepen our understanding of the logic that guides people's decisions over resource use, particularly among the rural poor whose livelihoods often depend on fragile and dynamic environments. This study seeks to identify the set of factors that influences how people respond to abrupt environmental disturbances and resource scarcity through changes in livelihood and resource management practices in two riverine communities of the Peruvian Amazon. The results reveal that socioeconomic characteristics such as forest knowledge and access to agricultural land explain striking differences among households in livelihood responses to environmental change, particularly concerning resource use behavior, resilience to disturbance, and the propensity to adopt more sustainable resource management strategies. This book should be especially useful to researchers, NGOs, policy makers, and community leaders working towards - or anyone else con­cerned about - poverty alleviation and sustainable resource use in tropical humid environments.