The brick kilns in India are associated with extremely low pay, poor working conditions and a lack of regulation. Equids, however, may provide a route out of poverty by enabling workers to access a higher income. The relatively higher financial returns from healthy equids could also motivate welfare improvements. We used a mixed-methods approach including livelihoods questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and welfare assessments to investigate the links between poverty, equid ownership and equid welfare in the brick kilns of Ahmedabad, India. Whilst equid owners earned more than non-owners during the kiln season, the opposite trend was found for these workers for work conducted outside of the kilns during the off-season. Equid ownership was, however, strongly influenced by social factors and, within certain communities, equid ownership may be the only viable escape from extreme poverty. In terms of welfare, equid behaviour was better for owners with better financial security, likely due to the availability of resources. Equid health improved with longevity of ownership, suggesting that owners who view working with their equids as a long-term partnership are more likely to ensure their equids are kept in good health. For stakeholders aiming to improve both human health and equid welfare, a ‘one welfare’ approach which values the intrinsic connections between poverty and both equid ownership and equid welfare could greatly increase success.

A growing body of ‘people and parks’ literature examines the interactions between protected areas (PAs) and people who live around them. This study of Chobe National Park (Botswana), which has one of the largest concentrations of wildlife in Africa, highlights a PA's influence beyond its buffer zone and provides a more detailed understanding of the complex dynamics within a PA buffer. Overall net population growth in the areas adjacent to Chobe National Park (hereafter referred to as the ‘buffer’ area) does not preclude outmigration from certain Park buffer areas where declining agricultural opportunities have pushed working-age residents in search of work to urban areas around and beyond the Park. At the same time, skilled workers have moved to some of these rural Park buffer villages to take advantage of new civil service positions. The PA also influences long-time rural dwellers’ social and economic exchanges with urban kin and exacerbates dependence relations, placing economic strain upon urban migrants. In this way, the economic and social effects of PAs are neither uniform across their borders nor limited to those borders. These outcomes have important implications for biodiversity conservation in rural areas as they suggest that population growth may not be an accurate proxy for threats to biodiversity, if new and long-term residents come to rely on less resource-intensive livelihood practices.

Understanding the role that protected areas play in the livelihood security of local communities is essential to ensure that local people are not left shouldering the costs of what is a public good, and to help maintain robust local and national constituencies for biodiversity conservation. To provide baseline data for a longitudinal study on the effects of newly established national parks on human livelihoods in Gabon we conducted a cross-sectional study that compared livelihood indicators between communities that do, and do not, use natural resources within protected areas. We interviewed 2,035 households in 117 villages at four sites, recording income, consumption, education, health indicators and social capital, and village characteristics such as distance to markets, distance to park boundaries, and land cover within a 5-km radius. Our results indicated that closed rainforest coverage was greater around park than control villages and that this difference was associated with a greater reliance of park households on forest resources. However, we found no systematic differences in most livelihood measures between park and control households. Instead, the relationship between household livelihood measures and proximity to parks varied in idiosyncratic ways between sites, suggesting that determinants of human welfare are highly localized and cannot be generalized to larger spatial scales.