Poverty and environment

9. The relation between poverty and our environment

There are interesting relationships between wealth and environmental impact. Wealthy people are generally the biggest consumers and leave the biggest carbon footprint. However the poor are often bigger polluters in terms of dumping rubbish, illegal mining, poaching, and burning forests for agriculture (like in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil). The wealthy people leave a big carbon footprint flying to a climate conference, while the poor worry less about the environment and just try to earn enough to feed themselves. Poor people depend most on natural resources for their livelihoods, and consequently suffer the most from the impacts of climate change, deforestation, overfishing, and other environmental problems. Environment and development issues can’t be separated.

Under sustainable development, the relationship between poverty and environmental change is described as a two-way interactive process (Gray and Moseley, 2005). Poverty is viewed as both a cause of environmental degradation and a result of people living in fragile and ecologically vulnerable environments. It are often the poorest people who live in ecologically fragile and vulnerable areas like flood plains, mountainous regions, and fragile forest ecosystems. In the cities it are the urban poor who live and work in environments with high exposure to environmental hazards like smog. Some research even shows that in the same city poor neighborhoods can be up to eleven degrees Celsius, or 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than wealthy neighborhoods! This dangerous discrepancy is called the ‘intraurban variability of temperature’ – or simply the ‘heat gap’. It occurs in cities all over the planet, and exists because some neighbourhoods end up getting far less investment than richer areas do. As a result, buildings in those areas tend to be lower quality – with less aircon and more porous walls, which let in heat. There are also fewer parks and green spaces that provide coolness and shade, and more paved areas to absorb heat.

Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) is the approach of analyzing and reducing poverty by incorporating the views of the poor. Participatory Poverty Assessments attempt to better understand the poor, to give the poor more influence over decisions that affect their lives, and to increase the effectiveness of poverty reduction policies. A review of 23 Participatory Poverty Assessments from the Department for International Development (DFID) emphasizes how the poor feel vulnerable to environmental shocks and stresses. These shocks and stresses can play a key role in moving people down to a lower state of well-being – they act as ‘drivers of poverty’. It is also said that “the poor live at the whim and mercy of nature”.

Although poor people are often more affected by climate change, they tend to care much less about the environment. One reason is lack of education, but a more important reason is that they have other things to worry about first. This makes perfect sense because unless you live directly from the nature around you, like indigenous people and farmers, your daily concerns are likely: “How to make enough money to pay for food, rent and take care of my family”. Case studies seem to show that unless the environmental impact directly influences the daily life of the poor people, they usually don’t care about the environment. Therefore poor people tend to damage and pollute more nature than necessary. Negative environmental impact from the poor includes:

• Large families (overpopulation)
• Pressure on fragile (farm)land
• Unnecessary deforestation (although this is of course also a problem from the rich)
• Insufficient knowledge and tools to conserve the environment
• Poaching (protected) wildlife
• Inadequate disposal of waste

Tourism can bring a sustainable improvement of the economic situation of the poor, which in return can help the environment.