ABSTRACT
The sustainable use of natural resources, recognizing and maintaining ecosystem services and natural capital, is central to economic growth and pro-poor development. Many high-income countries have relied heavily on their natural assets to achieve sustainable economic growth and development, for example, Canada (wood and grain), Australia and New Zealand (agricultural land, products and livestock). In addition, a small number of resource-rich developing countries, notably Botswana, Indonesia and Malaysia, have converted natural wealth into sustained rapid economic growth. Other developing countries, from Bhutan to Kenya, rely on their natural landscapes and diversity of wildlife to develop a significant eco-tourism industry. Yet developing countries with a rich environmental resource base have grown more slowly than others. Often, this is a result of underestimating the value of natural capital for economic and human development, and the mismanagement of environmental resources with the entrenchment of unequal power relationships in the use and management of those resources.
