THE IMPACT OF POVERTY

The Impact Of Poverty On The Environment In The Dominican Republic

The Impact Of Poverty On The Environment In The Dominican Republic

Introduction

Poverty may be defined in several ways depending on the point of focus. It relates to income, social and economic relativity, social indicators and even to our environment. From an income point of outlook, people are poor when they are in a state where, “their income (or consumption) is less than that needed to meet certain characterized needs.” This definition however, does not adequately address society's capability to accomplish a socially agreeable standard of dwelling that may entail having some education, information, legal rights and infrastructure. (Pender, 2000)

 

Discussion

People or a country can be poor in relation to the grade of development of the direct environment. Poverty relates to need of resources for production to afford a decent standard of living. Inability to access basic, but essential goods and services leads to both physical and mental dearth.(Leach, 2006) It is important to state that female-headed households in most SADC countries are especially disadvantaged due to need of access to productive resources or because they are refuted their rights to own resources such as land. (Hazell, 2004)

 

Poverty and Deforestation

Pro-environment/resource/nature groups care about the details of forest degradation because of its implications for species environment, carbon storage, erosion, and flooding. Whether poorer people degrade or conserve forest more, an understanding of their role in clarifying is vital, from this point outlook, for informing the design of policies to best conserve treasured ecological services.(Leach, 2006)Those in favor of ecological services and human equity desire such analysis to recognize how to decrease tradeoffs between forests and food. For any of these issues, it is important to note that much of the world's forest resides where the poor do.(Koop, 2005) Thus, examination of the relationship between poverty and deforestation can inform policies, be they bribing the poor to save forests or subsidizing forest for the poor that issue for large areas of forest and large numbers of people.

Poverty plays a major role in deforestation. The world's rainforests are found in the poorest areas on the planet. The people who reside in and around rainforests rely on these ecosystems for their survival. They collect crop and wood, search wildlife to put beef on the table, and are paid by companies that extract resources from forest lands. Agricultural expansion, mainly by smallholders, is the proximate cause of at least 50% of the deforestation in tropical forests. Understanding how these households make farming production and investment decisions is critical if policy makers wish to leverage the rate of tropical deforestation in a cost-effective manner. Equally important is the relationship between poverty and deforestation; governments are probable to be at least as concerned with increasing the incomes of country households as slowing the rate of deforestation since the environmental benefits of tropical forests, as a reservoir of carbon or biodiversity for demonstration, are overwhelmingly global in ...