1 - A New Triple-Win Option for the Environment of the Poor

Summary

The Southeast and East Asia regions have made major progress in reducing income poverty by bringing down the level of poverty incidence from 57 per cent in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2008 for the US$1.25 international poverty line and from 81 per cent to 28 per cent for the US$2 international poverty line, over the same period. However, living standards for many poor people remain a major challenge due to worsening environmental degradation and increasing vulnerability to climate change. Southeast and East Asia's remarkable economic growth over the last twenty years was often accompanied by environmental stress such as deforestation and overfishing, transformation of green areas into commercial and industrial land, and massive pollution and congestion in mega-cities.

Although the environmental problems of the Southeast and East Asia regions are reasonably well documented, less is known on how environmental policies, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures can be used to further reduce poverty and improve the situation of the poor who frequently live in the most environmentally fragile areas. This book argues that trade-offs between poverty reduction, improvement in quality of environment, and mitigation as well as adaptation to climate change, can be avoided. Policy makers can design policies which manage these three issues together to produce a triple-win outcome: raising the welfare of the population by simultaneously reducing poverty, improving the environmental quality, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.

This book presents empirical observations of this triple-win option in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. It describes livelihood and income generation opportunities for the poor, as well as environmental policies that directly influence the living standard of low- income people. This book, utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, argues that more triple­win outcomes would be possible for the poor, the environment, and the climate, if awareness of the environment in which the poor live were greater and consequently appropriate policies were implemented.