Environment Of Poverty

The world's poor population is getting concentrated in ecologically fragile areas

- Richard Mahapatra

POVERTY HAS been the world’s most persistent development challenge. By 2030, under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the world has to end poverty. But a yet to be published report from the World Bank—on the eve of the End Poverty Day on October 17—points out that we are much behind the target, and more importantly, poverty remains consistent in a few countries that also account for the largest chunk of the world’s poor. This raises alarms for two reasons: poverty is concentrated in a few countries and invariably the poor live in very ecologically fragile areas. Both evoke a fundamental question: is the environment somehow responsible for poverty?