The Review of the Relationship Between Poverty and Environment

As two essential parts of sustainable development, the poverty alleviation and environmental protection have become the focuses around the world. However, there are few successful attempts that aimed to integrate the economic and environmental objectives in practice. The knowledge of the relationship between the poverty and environmental degradation is still obscure and sometimes in debate so far. Historically, there are two theoretical origins on the relationship between poverty and environment. One is the some of pessimism affected by poverty trap and Environmental Kuznets Curve, which regards poverty and environmental degradation as a downward spiral or a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle. The other is the relatively optimistic argument, which emphasizes the possibility of integrating poverty alleviation and environmental protection due to the progress of technology. There are many debates about the causality of the poverty and environmental degradation, despite most scholars agreed that poverty is one of the consequences and the poor are the victims of environmental degradation. However, there are wide differences among varied schools on whether environment degradation was caused by poverty or not. The first school attributed the environmental degradation to poverty or the poor. On the contrary, the second school attributed environmental degradation to the relatively wealthy country, region or the rich. The third school seems to integrate the former two schools and argued that poverty and environmental degradation were affected by varied factors and the conventional linear relationship is too simple and arbitrary. Based on it, it is concluded that there are four characteristics and trends about the research, i.e., putting the poverty and environment into one analytical framework on the whole, focusing on the poor and emphasizing their livelihoods at the micro level, exploring the impact of climate change on poverty and its adaptation at the macro level, and promoting the interdisciplinary and multi-scale fusion from various perspective. This study aims to help to disclose the intrinsic mechanism of the relationship between poverty and environment. At the same time, there are important policy implications to China and other developing countries. Firstly, when the policy of poverty alleviation and environmental protection, the livelihoods of the poor must be treated as important as the environment so as avoid two extreme, i.e., developing at the expense of the environment or damaging the poor′s interests in the name of environmental protection is designed. Secondly, the benefits of different stakeholders such as the government, the public, the enterprise and the NGOs must be carefully respected and protected. Thirdly, the policy applicability of different scales must be comprehensively understood basing on the specific regional context. Fourthly, some hotspot areas, such as the ecologically fragile zones and the contiguous poverty-stricken areas in China must be recognized and given more assistance.