Sustainable Livelihoods
The sustainable livelihoods approach is an integrated development method, which brings individual approaches together to achieve sustainable development. It involves an assessment of community assets, adaptive strategies and technologies contributing to livelihood systems, and the analysis of cross-sectoral policies and investment requirements to enhance livelihoods.
Since the early 1990s, IISD has developed and applied the sustainable livelihoods approach to ongoing and difficult issues in stressed areas of the world. Our aim is to find workable synergies between poverty alleviation efforts and environmental improvement.
Currently our work is focused on:
Key Publication
Exploring the Links: Human Well-being, Poverty and Ecosystem Services
» Anantha K. Duraiappah, IISD, 2004.Exploring the Links sets out to demonstrate how human well-being is dependent upon ecosystems and ecosystem services; to identify barriers and drivers that prevent the poor from using these ecosystem services to improve their well-being, in essence perpetuating poverty; and to identify policy response options to remove the barriers, re-design or even introduce new intervention strategies to allow the poor to improve their well-being through an ecosystem approach.
Our Knowledge
» Themes
- Climate Change and Energy
- Economics and SD
- Foreign Investment for SD
- Governance for Sustainable Development
- Information Society
- International Trade
- Measurement and Assessment
- Natural Resources
- Networks & Partnerships
- Security
- Sustainable Markets
- Tomorrow's SD Leaders
» Initiatives
- Finance Alliance For Sustainable Trade (FAST)
- Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI)
- IISDLabs.org
- The IISD Media Blog
