Sustainable development can be defined as a development path and pattern in which the choices of the present generation are enlarged without restricting the choices of future generations. Thus, sustainable development highlights the need for meeting the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to do so.
Defined this way, the notion of sustainable development implies three issues: First, enlargement of human choices at any point would depend on economic, political, social, institutional, and environmental contexts. So, sustainability encompasses more than environment.
Second, the concept of sustainability is a dynamic inter-generational notion. Third, the abstract concept of sustainable development needs to be operationalized, which requires, among other things, measurable indicators and quantifiable targets, a framework for inter-temporal cost benefit analysis.
Development becomes sustainable if it is sustained on several fronts-- political, social, economic, and environmental. And it is the interaction of all these dimensions that makes sustainability real.
Sustainability is linked to all forms of capital -- natural, economic and social -- and their reproduction. Natural resources and their reproduction are a key to environmental sustainability. Economic capital, eg labour and its reproduction is needed for economic sustainability and social capital, ie bondage, interaction, and relationships among human beings within a society, is also a prerequisite for sustainability.
Since environmental sustainability is a key dimension of sustainable development and poverty reduction is the core of human development, it is essential to grasp the environment-poverty nexus including some specific environment-poverty myths.
The environment-poverty nexus is a two-way relationship. Environment affects poverty situations in three distinct dimensions: By providing sources of livelihoods to poor people, by affecting their health, and by influencing their vulnerability.
On the other hand, poverty also affects the environment in various ways: By forcing poor people to degrade the environment, by encouraging countries to go for economic growth at the expense of the environment, and by inducing societies to give non-priorities to environmental concerns including channeling resources to such concerns.
The environment matters a lot to the poor. Their well-being is strongly related to the environment in terms of health, earning capacity, security, physical surroundings, energy services, decent housing, and more.
In rural areas, poor people may be particularly concerned with their access and control over natural resources, especially in relation to food security. For poor people in urban areas, access to a clean environment may be a priority.
Prioritization of environmental issues may vary across different social groups. For example, poor women, reflecting their primary role in managing the household, may regard safe water, sanitation facilities, and abundant energy services as crucial aspects of well-being.
Some of the environmental degradations reflect truly global concerns, such as global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. Others are international, like acid rain, the state of the oceans, or the condition of rivers that run through several countries. Others are more localized, though they may often occur worldwide, like urban air pollution, water pollution, or soil degradation. Even though poor people also feel the impacts of global environmental degradation, it is local environmental damages that affect the lives of the poor more.
The impacts of environmental degradation were unequal between the poor and the rich. Environmental damages almost always hit poor people the hardest. The overwhelming majority of those who die each year from air and water pollution are the poor. So are those most affected by desertification, and those who are expected to be the worst affected by the floods, storms, and harvest failures brought about by global warming.
All over the world it is poor people who generally live nearest to dirty factories, busy roads, and dangerous waste dumps. The loss of biodiversity is most severe for poor rural communities. Environmental degradation, by depleting the health and natural support systems of poor people, may make them even more vulnerable.
Deconstructing some specific environment-poverty myths
Even though the poor people bear the brunt of environmental damage, the irony is that they are not the principal creators of them. It is the rich who pollute and contribute more to global warming. They are the ones who degrade the global commons, making resources scarce for the poor. In many areas, the non-poor, commercial companies, and state agencies actually cause the majority of environmental damages through land-cleaning, agro-chemical use, and water appropriation. The rich also generate more waste and create stress on nature's sink. Thus, poor people become victims of consumption levels and patterns of the rich.
In fact, one of the environmental challenges that stem from the growing poverty and environmental damage is that growing poverty pushes more and more people to the periphery -- to the most ecologically fragile land where they become even more vulnerable. Yet there are many examples in which poor people take care of the environment and invest in improving it.
While initially degradation may occur as population increases, what happens next is context-specific. Rapid population growth is not incompatible with sustainable management of the environment and in some cases, as has been demonstrated in the Machakos experience in Kenya, increasing population density is required for environmental sustainability.
Often in the discussions of the relationship between poverty and environmental damage, for the environmental behaviour of poor people, their impoverishment is identified as the sole reason. Arguments that maintain that poor people degrade the environment basically explain the poverty-environment nexus in terms of income levels only.
But the issue of the poverty-environment nexus is more complex. Questions of the ownership of natural resources, of access to common resources, of the strength or weakness of communities and local institutions, of the way information about poor people’s entitlements and rights to resources is shared with them, of the way people cope with risk and uncertainty, of the way people use scarce time -- all these are important in explaining people’s environmental behaviour.
Many of the natural resources that are degraded are communal property. But rights are ill defined, often because they were originally defined in a local social and political framework, which is no longer there. Institutions for managing common property that reflect the consensus of owners and can control use are lacking.
In ecologically fragile ecosystems, people tend to minimize risks, not maximize output, whether they are poor or rich. Over exploitation of sources of fuel-wood is linked more to the time available to women than to their poverty status. There is a genderdimension, but not necessarily an income dimension.
Many factors shape human behaviour toward the environment, some of course related to poverty or affluence, others independent of either income or poverty.
Dr Selim Jahan is Former Director, Human Development Report Office and Poverty Division, United Nations Development Program, New York, USA.