Mainstreaming Environment

Making environment more transparent aiming at mainstreaming environmental messages by informational tactics. Product innovation will be spurred by new trend of rising awareness of environmental consequences. One tactic to change attitudes and behaviours toward environmental pollution is to advocate environment friendly living habits by grabbing attention, providing environmental information, innovative easy to use measurements and improving production along that line. Business must lead the way in helping to change consumer behaviour. Healthy food taking consciousness will encourage concerns and active participation in response to environment and additional attention toward our relation with natural resources that were easily accessed in the past but may change in the future.





Making Sense of Poverty and the Environment

Poverty the core reason for human suffering prevails where there is lack of opportunities to satisfy needs and avoid deprivation. The most comprehensive approach to assess needs includes development of capacities and environment for human to flourish. Poverty maps are drawn to develop various kinds of decisions for poverty alleviation. Researchers looking for empirical relationships between poverty and context indicators found significant differences in poverty and welfare levels between communities living in different environment. Poverty, therefore, can be related merely to where one is born and its frail environment particularly where governments are unresponsive.

Comprehensive strategic thinking to address poverty and causes of chronic poverty are to be found in environmental factors, infrastructure and provision of public services, emphasizing on geographic locations as important variables in all poverty assessments. As such reliable data on contextual conditions need to be revisited particularly for additional stress on environmental degradation and natural resources depletion that were missing in economic counts. Over population measures have also been neglected area in poverty analysis for the past decades which saw a growth of two fold at the end of last century while it could have been prevented by timely interventions. Such factors should therefore be considered in the design and implementation of any poverty reduction strategies and used as a guide for resource allocation.

Data deficiency and lack of comparative analysis hinder understanding of depth and measures of poverty. The threshold between the poor and non poor should be sensitive to the characteristics of the overall population, culture, local meaning and history. Poverty line should indicate the basis of essential needs for a dignified living that can not be irrespective to societal standards. From a political approach to poverty a relative standard makes more sense as people’s understanding of feeling poor and toleration of poverty that is needed to mobilize governments intervention for taking action is generally relative to average standards in that society.

Multidimensional analysis and such sense of poverty brings clearer picture for identifying where the poor are, under what environmental conditions they live and why the poor are where they are, but there is a need to refine and extend this analysis, including more disaggregate analysis at the agro ecological zone level, as well as incorporating supplementary information from other data sources such as the livestock and agricultural census, national agricultural survey, demography and health survey, and service delivery survey.

Nonetheless, using a combination of geo-referenced environmental information and household expenditure explore the statistical relation between poverty and the environment at a fine resolution. Cross sectional data can be used to explain the relationship between the location of the poor and the environment and how changes in levels of poverty relate to changes in selected environmental indicators.

Increasingly two basic point of intervention have been maximizing access to health and education with recent stress on lowering barriers to infrastructure provision, maintenance and access that is related to environment and space. Classrooms with teachers, clinics with nurses, running taps and working toilets: these basic public services are called to be the key to ending global poverty, according Oxfam and WaterAid (Sept 2006).

Evidently environmental factors creating more unaccounted troubles have gained additional importance in future poverty eradication efforts. Poverty issues and overpopulation suppressed by bad governance causing bad debts are listed among other disturbing factors on the way to development in many developing countries. Faced with failing government services, the private sector is the only option left while such services are always carry with it inequalities and high costs which result in exclusion of the poorest. Market-led solutions without government support have often undermined the provision of essential services and have had a negative impact on the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

Public services in least developed countries saw teachers’ salaries halved since 1970. And there are not so many more selfless teachers who are willing to sign in. where governments fail to provide water services, poor consumers have to buy water from private traders, spending up to five times more per litre than richer consumers who have access to piped water (Oxfam, 2005). International agencies such as the World Bank should act as crucial partners in supporting public systems and prioritize to deliver debt relief and predictable aid that supports public systems. A well ordered credit system is in the hand of governments as lifeblood of an economy. The task of supporting economic growth to allow capital to move from savers to borrowers efficiently is vital particularly for those lack resources.

As such, an analytical link between the people and their local environments can be established, that is between the economic data, governance responsiveness and environmental data. Information on all dimensions of well-being; household and socio-economic characteristics including education, assets, employment and household consumption expenditure can be aggregated with data from the population and housing census, housing characteristics, location of residences and access to basic utilities to map the spatial distribution of poverty. In order to understand the relationship between poverty and the environment, some additional environmental variables must be combined describing land cover and land use, and roads, as well as rainfall, amount of arable land, distance to nearest towns with varying population densities, slope, rangelands, distance to hospitals, travel times to different towns and roads, and flooding areas. The choice of environmental variables estimates is making grave difference in terms of the level of poverty and thus the targeting of poverty alleviation programs.

Ultimately, investigating less or more poverty can be explained by different impacts that poverty renders on people’s lives, sense of self and capability to cope with consequences. There should be particular concern to incorporate sense of loss for people entangled in poverty due to unexpected catastrophic incidents being natural or political causing disastrous changes in their lives. As a result they are faced with unforeseen circumstances unthinkable in the past. Living in traumas for the survivors of disasters or those subject to political oppression, confiscation and wars, are most devastating compared to other impacts of poverty. Affected people need whole new conception of how to go about their lives. Nothing will ever be the same for them anymore.