The Environment-poverty Nexus

Abstract

The environment-poverty nexus encompasses a variety of social and political as well as econom-ic factors that obstruct the achievement of the MDGs. The nexus is also freighted by a number of myths that implicitly discriminate against the poor and threaten environmental sustainability, one of their major resources in today’s world. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) looked closely at the linkage between sustainable development and achieving the MDGs. If sustainable development can be defined as a development path and pattern in which the choic-es of the present generation are enlarged without restricting the choices of future generations, the concept implies three issues: • Enlargement of human choices at any point would depend on economic, politi-cal, social, institutional and environmental contexts. Thus sustainability encompasses more than environment. • The concept of sustainability is a dynamic intergenerational notion. • The abstract concept of sustainable development needs to be operationalised, which requires, among other things, measurable indicators and quantifiable tar-gets, a framework for inter-temporal cost-benefit analysis. Development becomes sustainable if it is pursued on several fronts – the political, social, economic, and environmental. And it is the interaction of policies and out-comes in all these dimensions that makes sustainability real. • Political sustainability encompasses reproducibility of power structures and gover-nance mechanisms, along with the evolution of institutions and the institutional framework that would carry out the tasks ensuring that the present generation maximises its choices but not at the cost of opportunities for future generations.