If unemployment increases, won't the strain on natural habitats increase? In other words, won't protecting the environment become increasingly difficult?

One reason why Dr Brussaard and his colleagues are concerned about this is that they believe environmental degradation goes hand-in-hand with poverty. Missing the goal for the environment thus risks missing it for the people who live in that environment.

SHOOT: The short answer is yes, unless we can incentivise conservation. But where will money come from for this? From Goldman Sachs?

clipped from www.economist.com SEEKING to alleviate poverty, reduce world hunger and protect biodiversity sounds, to your correspondent’s ears, like something a Miss World hopeful might have pledged in the 1980s. In fact, it was what a professor of soil quality at a lesser-known university in the Netherlands promised to a scientific conference that concluded on October 16th. Addressing hundreds of biologists, ecologists and social scientists who were meeting in Cape Town under the auspices of Diversitas, an interdisciplinary group of researchers, Lijbert Brussaard of Wageningen University outlined progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals agreed by members of the United Nations in 2001. One of the targets was to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss of biodiversity. That has not happened. Neither will it do so next year.