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Analysing the links between Poverty and the Environment

Introduction

Way back in 1992, IUCN conducted an environmental assessment study of Sarhad Rural Support Corporation (SRSC) to make its intervention packages environment friendly. Recommendations of the study were compiled in the form of a report that never got a chance of practical application in the field due incomplete integration of the environmental concerns into the programme strategy.

In 1998, HRD section of SRSC realised that we need to take caution in our planning, implementation and management to avoid adverse environmental impact from our seemingly innocuous interventions with the communities' resource base. And that was impossible without going through a process of thoroughly integrating environmental care in our poverty alleviation programme. As a result, we started a joint programme with IUCN that has enable SRSC to be the first among Rural Support Programmes (RSPs) to have initiated a comprehensive programme in collaboration with the IUCN to systematically relate its activities to the environment changes and adjust its programme packages accordingly. We can now claim that SRSC has become an environmentally concerned programme.

Most importantly, the SRSC-IUCN joint assessment and planning experience gave me an opportunity to systematically explore and analyse the links between rural poverty and environment and understand the importance of integrating environmental concerns into other poverty alleviation and development programmes, because thinking of environment has become divorced from social and economic theories of development and poverty alleviation efforts due to these unexplored links in Pakistan. The following summarised analysis introduces the concept of "investment poverty" and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links.

The general trend

Wherever there is a discussion on poverty and environment, it is pointed out that just as affluence is responsible for the environmental degradation in the developed countries, poverty is the root cause of many environmental problems in the developing countries simply because they cannot worry about the "luxury" of a cleaner environment. The "vicious circle" of poverty is more often than not brought into discussion to establish that environmental degradation in turn leads to further poverty. At these occasions such point of views are justified with the arguments made by H. J. Leonard in his Environment and the poor: Developing strategies for a common agenda (1989) that poverty alleviation will necessarily reduce degradation of the environment, and its inverse, that arresting and reversing environmental decline will help the poor.

The following analysis identifies the following gaps in prevailing approaches to environmental management, development and poverty alleviation along with the more common "sustainable development" debate (Sustainable Development: A critical Review, World Development, Vol. 19. No. 6, pp 607-21), whereby the E-P links are mentioned but not properly explored.

We usually treat "Poverty" as a single concept. Rarely asked is how the type of poverty influences the E-P link. Types of poverty differ according to the lack of various assets and presence of different causes. A household might be well endowed in one asset but poor in another, and it has been proved that that the type of poverty can influence the E-P links.
We usually do not differentiate types of environmental change when discussing E-P links, or it focuses on particular type of change like soil erosion or deforestation. But the environment can be differentiated by the components of natural resources. Expanding the debate to differentiate between types of environmental problems can have important implications for understanding the links in our perspective.
Apart from the UNDP and other statistics, our government and different poverty eradication and development related organisations do not usually treat poverty measurement issues -- level, distribution (over households), and time path (whether it is transitory of chronic), and particularly how these can affect the E-P links.
Even on part of the UNDP, it is inadequate to limit the measurement of poverty to "welfare-poverty," measured according to the old income, consumption or nutrition criteria as mentioned in Poverty, Under nutrition and Hunger by Lipton M., in World Bank Staff Working papers, (no 597, 1983). We need to stress that the criterion for poverty in E-P analysis should be the ability to make minimum investments in resource improvements to maintain or enhance the quantity and quality of the resource base, to forestall or reverse resource degradation.
Thus, a household below this line can be classified as "investment poor" (a term used by some South American researchers) to differentiate it from being "welfare poor." Households or villages above a welfare-determined poverty may still be too "investment poor" to make e.g. needed soil conservation investment. An investment poor household can become welfare poor if its activities lead to degradation of natural resources. Also a household might be above an investment-poverty line on average, but have severely unstable income and thus be more averse to risky investments in NRM.
Criteria for measuring "welfare poverty" may be appropriate for assessing human misery, but may not be the appropriate benchmark for use in assessing poverty levels in the context of analysis of E-P links and properly addressing environmental concerns through programmes which are not specifically designed for environmental management. Purely "welfare poverty" criteria can miss the potentially large group of households that are not "absolutely poor" by the usual (consumption-oriented) definition, but are too poor -- in that that their surplus above the minimum diet line is still too small -- to make key conservation or intensification investments necessary for their proper resource management practices. Similarly, socio-economic and welfare poverty surveys (Including the Poor by Lipton and Van der Gaag, 1994) used by RSPs can not necessarily detect the kind or level of poverty that may be important to environmental links.
Our development and poverty alleviation programmes rarely discuss the strength and symmetry of the causal links between poverty and environment. Is poverty alleviation necessary or sufficient to redress environmental problems? Does redressing the environmental problems alleviate poverty? Under what circumstances? These questions are critical for policy formulation and sequencing. The answers to these questions depend on the type and level of poverty, the type of strategy and the kind of investment required for addressing region specific environmental problems.

To address these shortcomings, a new conceptual framework is needed to initiate and gradually move a debate on these links into a more practical and strategic domain. Such a framework should:

Differentiate types of poverty and types of environmental change into categories useful for guiding different programmes and their policies, and monitoring the effects of different programmes on their policies and projects.
Show the household behaviour determinants of the links (for instance reasons behind household's resource allocation to income earning activities and investment and the environmental consequences of this allocation), and how policy and other factors condition this behaviour.

Fig: Links between the four sets of variables and the way these links are being influenced by conditioning variables

Conclusions

In Pakistan, not all environmental degradation is linked to poverty. But where there are links between poverty and the environment, they are often complex and to address them is a challenge to be faced by the NGO/RSP sector in coordination with the government line departments. To date efforts to analyse the E-P link have been too general on the poverty side, too general on the environment side, and thus have not been able to sort out seemingly-conflicting observations made and presented by both sides. This analysis shows that:

The level of poverty conditions the E-P links. Households can have incomes above an established welfare poverty line but still be too poor in key assets and thus overall cash and human resources to be able to make critical investments or follow key land use practices to enhance or maintain their natural resource base. They might thus be better off than the "welfare poor" but still be "investment poor"; the former is usually also the latter. In any case, the important measure for poverty in the analysis of E-P links is "investment poverty."
The type of poverty affects the E-P links. The "type" should be defined according to the asset category or categories in which households are poor. The potential for substitutability among assets in income generation and investment influences the relation between poverty in a given asset and household behaviour; substitutability itself is conditioned by the existence and performance of asset and output markets.
The distribution of poverty across households within a community affects the E.P links. It does so directly, as well as indirectly through affecting the wealth of the community and its ability to manage risk, to compensate the poor, and to build and maintain infrastructure that can help the poor to invest in natural resource enhancement.
The type of environmental problem conditions the E-P links. Poverty and soil degradation interact differently from the way poverty and rural pollution do, or as poverty and loss of biodiversity do.
The income, investment and land use strategies of the rural household and community determine the E-P links. Poverty affects what kind of activities and investments are undertaken, and in what way? And thus how natural resources are used and enhanced.

The E-P links between poverty and environment in a given setting depend on the level, distribution and type of poverty, the type of environmental problem, and conditioning variables. As these change over contexts, the direction of causality and the strength of the links can change. Given the diversity of types of poverty and types of environmental problems, policy should be site specific, and the proposed conceptual framework should provide guidance in policy formulation and implementation.

Enhancing the natural resource base can reduce poverty, where for example soil degradation is reducing yields on the farms of the poor. But conserving natural resources can also increase poverty, for instance in cases where poor household income are barred from gathering the wild flora and fauna but depend on this as a key income strategy for survival.

The most effective way to simultaneously reduce poverty and enhance the resource base is to understand what categories of asset poverty and conditioning variables are driving households' behaviour (e.g. degrading land use practices or lack of conservation investments), and focus effort on these. Promotion of key markets, investment in complementary infrastructure, and research to make resource management technologies more productive and affordable are examples of such efforts. Policy should aim at affecting household and community behaviour with the aim of helping poor households to attain their main objective, food security, while as much as possible maintaining or enhancing the resource base.

Recommendation

The bottomline is that, in the short term, reducing poverty will not necessarily protect the environment, nor will protecting the environment necessarily alleviate poverty. Specific policy action to affect the set of conditioning variables will be needed to maximise the achievement of both goals at once. Moreover, reducing poverty just to the point where households are over the "welfare-poverty" line may not be enough in many cases for households to be well-off enough to be able to afford key investments in natural resource management; the latter require that households be above the "investment poverty" line, a line that depends on the costs and types of investment needed, and the composition of assets of the poor household.

For realising this objective, all NGOs -- particularly RSPs and IUCN -- shall conduct workshops and research on national level to analyse several policy implications and research gaps that emerge from the above conclusions. We need to find out how the conditioning variables -- markets, natural resource use and conservation technologies, relative prices, infrastructure and institutions, the level and distribution of community wealth, and population growth -- affect the strategies of the poor and the programmes functioning for them. After a thorough analysis, many of these conditioning variables can be influenced by sound integration of environmental concerns in different development and poverty alleviation policies.

Reducing poverty can reduce resource degradation where poverty is driving extensification onto marginal fragile hillside of forests. But alleviating poverty will not necessarily lead of less resource degradation where the only insurance available is investment in more livestock, and insurance demand increases with household income. Or alleviating poverty will not reduce pollution from overuse of agricultural chemicals, the use of which increases with farmer wealth. RSPs, therefore, are needed in particular to chalk out policies to give a sense of environmental responsibility both to communities and the programme in the light of exposed and properly understood E-P links.

President

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