Sustainable social development is an undiminished part of environmental sustainability. Social development indicators are, therefore, needed to complete the picture for the monitoring of poverty and environment. These indicators should reflect the extent to which the poor participate in the process of economic decision-making in the development initiatives that affect them. The different stages in this process include identifying stakeholders, bringing them together to express priorities, intermediate between the poor and those who have authorities, getting financial resources needed for implementation to the poor, and monitoring project implementation. While indicators could be developed for each platform, most that have been used so far pertain to financial resources and implementation. 

Since poverty is now seen as both a consequence and a cause of environmental degradation-improvements in environmental quality should help to reduce poverty and vice versa. Lacking the means to relocate to areas with clean air or to lobby for better access to water and sanitation; the poor bear the burnt of rising pollution. Their poor nutritional status renders them more susceptible to the health effects of declining environmental quality. Poor women and children face respiratory illness from biomass smoke in their indoor environment. The declining natural resource base exacerbates the condition of the poor by limiting their already restricted production possibilities. As production possibilities diminish and population pressure rise, limited possibilities are overexploited triggering a process of cumulative causation where poverty and degradation feed into each other. 

The relation of poverty to the environment also needs to be evaluated at the country and household levels. These relate selected environment indicators (water, health, and pollution ) to the national incidence of absolute poverty. Freshwater withdrawals rise with falling poverty. This is, in effect, a reverse indicator of the fact that the poor have less access to piped water. But given its broad correlation with poverty, the importance of policy in this area must not be overlooked. 

Even in the same bracket of poverty incidence, per capita water withdrawals can very substantially. A striking example is the effect that water supply tariffs have had on consumption of water in former East Germany. Since 1989 average daily consumption in the eastern part of Germany has dropped from an estimated 300 to 400 litters per capita to about 105 litters per capita. 

The incidence of respiratory and diarrheal diseases is greater in poorer regions, such as South Asia. Other aspects of health-such as malnutrition-are also affected by environmental degradation, most particularly by the declining quality of agricultural land. The percentage of young children whose growth is stunted is twice as high in the poorest as in the least poor countries (although non-environmental factors are also a cause). 

 Regarding air pollution, the rich world emits carbon dioxide at rates ten to twenty times higher than those in the developing world. Carbon dioxide emissions per capita from fossil fuel combustion also very among developing countries and are, as expected, significantly higher in countries with the lowest poverty rates. 
While rates of deforestation are not systematically related to poverty at the country level, there is evidence that the existing net fuel-wood supply is lower in poorer countries. Those with intermediate poverty rates had an average balance of only 4.5 million cubic meters, while in the poorest countries the balance was negatives. The evidence further suggests that within countries the poor must go increasingly father distances and spend over more time gathering fuel-wood. 

As was the case with basic needs indicators, data on environmental indicators are much scarcer at the household than the national level. Most of the available information  currently pertains health and sanitation . For example, the case study found that only one in four very poor households had adequate sanitary facilities, as opposed to more than 60 percent of non-poor household. Over time access  has improved for the non-poor but declined for the poorest households as against 38 percent households. Garbage removal by truck was available to only 5 percent of the poorest households as against 38 percent of the non-poor 10. 

It is found that the poor suffer disproportionately from urban environment insults, like in , Karachi, because of their physical location, inadequate access to health care, poor environmental infrastructure, poor quality of services, and overcrowding. Environmentally hazardous areas, for instance, are often inhabited by the poor because they fetch a lower market price. In addition the poor pay more for basic environmental services and infrastructure. It confirmed the need for targeted interventions to improve the environmental conditions of the poor. There is clear evidence that such interventions should form part of nations’ overall strategy to alleviate poverty. 

An important dimension of the two-way link between poverty and the environment, especially in rural areas, is the condition of common property resources. Many poor depend on such common resources as forests, grazing lands, fishing ground, irrigation systems, drinking water, and sanitation. Deforestation, soil erosion, desertification, and other forms of environmental deterioration have diminished the incomes of many rural poor and increased their vulnerability. Because poverty limits people’s options and induces them to deplete resources at a more rapid rate than is compatible with long-term sustainability, the poor themselves aggravate the process of environmental degradation. 

The primary factors influencing this vicious circle are the management practices and ownership of common property resources. It is often the collapse of traditional management systems that converts them into open-access to resources. Ill-defined or ill-enforced private property rights, or ineffective state management, can also result in excessive use, which will eventually make everyone worse off. By the same token effective cooperative management by stakeholders can halt, or even reverse, such erosion. Among other factors that have contribute to successful cooperative management are internal homogeneity of the user groups and vesting stakeholders with real responsibility for management. Cooperative local management can both improve the condition of common resources, and increase returns to investment in them. 
The issue of self-management has been investigated empirically through case studies, an approach that poses difficulties for monitoring this aspect of the poverty-environment link. The environmental indicators give a rough sense of the state and change of common resources. A more challenging task would be to capture the effect of imperfect management regimes as the force driving the downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation. Being in mind their location- specific nature, findings of case studies need to be systematized and specific indicators developed to capture poverty rules, management arrangements, and stakeholders’ degree of effective participation and control. These tasks are essential for monitoring social sustainability. 

Popular participation is one aspect of the wider notion of social capital, which refers to social values and norms, institutional arrangements, and people’s attitudes and capacities- all of which influence the process of development and determine its ultimate sustainability. Poverty depletes social capital and reduces social sustainability. A direct indicator of this fact is the reduced range of production and consumption options open to communities that face worsening conditions of natural resources. 

Adequate monitoring of the poverty-environment nexus, including the social dimension, will take time. Recognizing the need for indicators at the country as well as the household level, three lines for future work emerge. At the micro-economic level, the challenges is link to household dimensions of poverty to environmental information, which often applies to geographic entities such as countries, regions, villages, and so on. A fruitful source of such data is satellite imagery, and more work is needed to combine this information with household survey information on poverty. This could be done both through overly maps include the environmental dimension. Ideally this approach can used to highlight both directions of causality in the poverty-environment vicious circle so as to determine, first, how impoverishment adds to environmental degradation and second, which aspects of the latter constitute impediments to the escape from poverty. A supplementary task is to identify a set of environmental variables that could be collected to enhance future poverty and environmental analyses. 

At macro-economic level, the relation between poverty and environment needs to be explored beyond the simple correction of national product and wealth estimates with the Gini coefficient. A multivariate approach-whereby country-level poverty is estimated economically as a function of wealth companies, economic growth, distribution, and so on-holds promise. 

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