Sustainable livelihoods, deforestation, and supply chains: Analysis of environmental and socio-economic data from the frontier of the Peruvian Amazon

This project supports sustainable economic development and welfare in farming communities in the Western edge of the Peruvian Amazon, by assisting a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Peru called CIMA (Centro de Conservación, Investigación y Manejo de Areas Naturales) to analyse and manage its socio-economic and geospatial data. Through analysis of extensive secondary data on farmer households and agricultural supply chains, alongside geospatial data providing evidence of patterns of deforestation in the landscape, the project aims to gain a better understanding of current practices, challenges, and opportunities for improving agricultural sustainability in the region. It will examine the data needed to inform and monitor the levels of sustainable rural livelihoods and forest conservation in the landscape, and seek to understand how sustainable agriculture (e.g. Fair Trade and organic certifications; agroforestry schemes) can be incentivised and promoted. Importantly, the project will develop standardised processes for data analysis to help support CIMA's objectives for improving the quality of life of local communities while conserving forests.

As CIMA is required to report on how its conservation work benefits local people, the project will support the development of a data management approach that is based on community needs and wants, and helps to develop a holistic approach to understanding the links between livelihoods, supply chains, and deforestation. The proposed project will involve collection, cleaning and consolidation of the NGO-held data, and develop a platform on which the data can be stored and easily accessed by CIMA in the long-term. This will support the NGO in project monitoring and evaluation duties, and reporting to funding agencies, impact investors and against policy frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Following the principles of mutual learning and transparency, all data and analysis will be shared by all members of the project team, and regular online meetings will be held between the research team and CIMA, to ensure that the data platform is developed with the input of users and to ensure that the project meets CIMA's needs. The project is based on a strong relationship between the research team and the local partners, CIMA, who have successfully worked together on a preliminary ESRC IAA fund.

The research term at the University of Sussex will organise a series of three participatory workshops (project inception; capacity building; outputs and impact workshops) in Peru, with the project's beneficiaries and stakeholders, including local and national government agencies. This will help to ensure that the project is supportive of Peru's national vision for sustainable development and that the project can inform sub-national and national policy in Peru. Furthermore, the project has important implications for a large international community of practice (including business, civil society, funding agencies, governments) working on the intersection of forests, supply chains and local livelihoods; which demands a strong evidence base for action. The research team is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together environmental scientists, human geographers, sustainable supply chain and performance indicator experts. Outcomes of the research will then also inform those various academic communities, leading to better understanding of the influences between rural development, agricultural commodity production, including for export to global markets, and environmental conservation.

The diverse rural communities surrounding Cordillera Azul National Park in Peru face several challenges in developing sustainable livelihoods, but knowledge is fragmented on how best to address these challenges while conserving forests in the landscape. To support local natural resource governance and improve the wellbeing of local people, analysis of socio-economic, supply chain and environmental (geospatial) data is required to better understand the pressures and opportunities for more sustainable development pathways. While a significant amount of this data already exists and is held by the local NGO partner, CIMA (responsible for the management of the National Park and the buffer zone), the NGO currently lacks the capacity to undertake systematic analysis of this data. Thus, this project addresses the current gap in data analysis related to sustainable livelihoods, forest landscapes and supply chains.

The direct beneficiaries of this project will be the local NGO partner, CIMA; and indirect beneficiaries will be the local communities in Peru with whom the NGO works on implementation of quality of life plans, agroforestry and sustainable agriculture projects, and forest conservation.

The research impacts are action-oriented, from the research design to the plan for disseminating the research findings. CIMA have contributed to the proposal from the research design stage by sharing details of their data collection methods and identifying their data analysis and management needs. The NGO is committed to recruiting a research assistant/ data analyst to help build long-term in-house capacity for data management and analysis. This will support CIMA to: monitor and evaluate their conservation development projects, identify areas that require greater attention that impede progress towards sustainable development (e.g. identification of social or ecological risks), and effectively and efficiently report to donors, the government, and against international policy frameworks. CIMA's projects require the use of participatory methods in collecting socio-economic and environmental data from communities (e.g. community mapping through participatory GIS, focus group discussions and workshops), and the project will extend these participatory methods to ensure that the development of data management platform is user-led, and responds to the needs of CIMA and the communities it represents. CIMA's data is rich, but contains some gaps in data collected and lacks clear and systematic protocols for data collection, management, and analysis. The proposed project intends to assist the NGO in addressing these existing shortcomings.


For dissemination of the findings, we are targeting diverse interdisciplinary academic, policy and practitioner audiences to inform both research and future interventions for sustainable development. To ensure sub-national and national policy relevance, and to further strengthen the findings of the project, the project will involve three multi-stakeholder workshops across the project lifecycle. This will impact on the local partners and other stakeholders, the concepts and methodologies used in this project will help inform other projects related to sustainable development; increasing the replicability and scalability to other areas in Peru and Latin America facing similar deforestation and socio-economic risks.

Other user communities are outlined in the project's Pathways to Impact statement, and include local government offices, government agencies in Peru (SERNANP and MINAM), donors (impact investors and multilateral agencies), and business, civil society, funding agencies, governments) working on the intersection of forests, supply chains and local livelihoods.