Global Consumption Patterns Exacerbate Poverty

In the last 50 years, humans have made unprecedented changes to our planet and its natural systems  — largely to meet rising demands for food, water, and energy. Over 60 percent of the services nature provides to us – so-called “ecosystem services” – are being used in ways that cannot be sustained.  As a result, some of the greatest challenges to achieving several U.S. foreign policy goals are rooted in the natural places and systems that sustain all societies:  ensuring food security and clean water availability, promoting health, avoiding violent conflict, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Poverty Alleviation and Natural Resources

Indeed, the most vulnerable people are those whose livelihoods directly depend on nature and on the benefits that nature provides.  Activities such as harvesting wild food, fodder for livestock, medicinal plants, fuelwood, and timber provides a key source of income for poorer families in many countries.  The effects of ecosystem degradation biodiversity loss will be most severe among the poorest communities.  Subsistence farmers, fishermen, the rural poor and traditional societies are most at risk.   Extended droughts stress grasslands that provide food for people and their livestock. Diminishing freshwater supplies limit availability for basic human needs and agriculture. Overfishing and the destruction of coral reefs put fisheries and marine-based economies and livelihoods at risk.

Poverty Alleviation and Natural Areas

Many conventional approaches to alleviating poverty reproduce or expand consumption patterns that are threatening wild places and the ecosystems services they provide. This endangers the long-term effectiveness of poverty alleviation efforts, and increases the pressures on people living in wild areas whose livelihoods depend on direct use of natural resources.

Global Poverty Affects Us All

The impacts of ecosystem destruction and species losses cross political boundaries. Dust storms or fires from land destruction in one country can degrade air quality in other countries. Degradation of natural resources like clean water, arable land and fish stocks worsens poverty in the developing countries, and can slow regional economic growth and contribute to conflicts and migration to adjacent industrial countries.  Industries like fishing, agriculture and forestry are directly dependent on ecosystem services like rainfall and soil nutrient cycling.  The collapse of fish stocks and fisheries, especially those on wide-ranging stocks has severe negative impacts on communities in developing and developed countries alike.