Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T07:00:44.990Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The multifaceted relationship between environmental risks and poverty: new insights from Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2018

Ulf Narloch  and
Mook Bangalore
Ulf Narloch
Affiliation:
The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
Mook Bangalore*
Affiliation:
The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA Department of Geography and Environment, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, London, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite complex interlinkages, insights into the multifaceted relationship between environmental risks and poverty can be gained through an analysis of different risks across space, time and scale within a single context using consistent methods. Combining geo-spatial data on eight environmental risks and household survey data from 2010–2014 for the case study of Vietnam, this paper shows: (i) at the district level, the incidence of poverty is higher in high risk areas, (ii) at the household level, poorer households face higher environmental risks, (iii) for some risks the relationship with household-level consumption varies between rural and urban areas, and (iv) environmental risks explain consumption differences between households, but less so changes over time. While altogether these analyses cannot establish a causal relationship between environmental risks and poverty, they do indicate that Vietnam's poor are disproportionally exposed. Given growing pressures due to climate change, addressing such risks should be a focus of poverty reduction efforts.

Keywords

Climate changeconsumption, environmenthouseholdslivelihoodspovertyrisksvulnerabilityI30I32O10Q50Q54R20
Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 23 , Special Issue 3: Poverty and Climate Change , June 2018 , pp. 298 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akter, S and Mallick, A (2013) The poverty-vulnerability-resilience nexus: evidence from Bangladesh. Ecological Economics 96, 114–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angelsen, A, et al. (2014) Environmental income and rural livelihoods: a global-comparative analysis. World Development, Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation 64(suppl. 1), S12–S28.Google ScholarPubMed
Arouri, M, Nguyen, C and Youssef, AB (2015) Natural disasters, household welfare, and resilience: evidence from rural Vietnam. World Development 70, 59–77.Google Scholar
Baggio, JA and Papyrakis, E (2010) Ethnic diversity, property rights, and natural resources. The Developing Economies 48(3), 473–495.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyay, S and Skoufias, E (2015) Rainfall variability, occupational choice, and welfare in rural Bangladesh. Review of Economics of the Household 13(2), 589–634.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyay, S, Shyamsundar, P and Baccini, A (2011) Forests, biomass use and poverty in Malawi. Ecological Economics 70(12), 2461–2471.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bangalore, M, Smith, A and Veldkamp, T (2016) Exposure to Floods, Climate Change, and Poverty in Vietnam. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 7765, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbier, EB (2010) Poverty, development, and environment. Environment and Development Economics 15, 635–660.Google Scholar
Barbier, EB (2012) Natural Capital, Ecological Scarcity and Rural Poverty. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 6232, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbier, EB (2015) Climate Change Impacts on Rural Poverty in low-Elevation Coastal Zones. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 7475, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, CB, Travis, AJ and Dasgupta, P (2011) On biodiversity conservation and poverty traps. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 13907–13912.Google Scholar
Barrios, S, Bertinelli, L and Strobl, E (2010) Trends in rainfall and economic growth in Africa: a neglected cause of the African growth tragedy. The Review of Economics and Statistics 92(1), 350–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braubach, M and Fairburn, J (2010) Social inequities in environmental risks associated with housing and residential location – a review of evidence. European Journal of Public Health 20(1), 36–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brauer, M, et al. (2015) Ambient air pollution exposure estimation for the global burden of disease 2013. Environment Science and Technology 50(1), 79–88.Google Scholar
Bui, AT, et al. (2014) The impact of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality: evidence from Vietnam. Applied Economics 46, 1751–1766.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, MR, et al. (2007) Poverty traps and natural disasters in Ethiopia and Honduras. World Development 35, 835–856.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomitz, KM, et al. (2007) At Loggerheads: Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction, and Environment in the Tropical Forests. Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Crespo, Cuaresma JC, et al. (2017) Economic development and forest cover: evidence from satellite data. Scientific Reports 7, 40678.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dasgupta, S, et al. (2005) Where is the poverty–environment nexus? Evidence from Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam. World Development 33, 617–638.Google Scholar
del Ninno, C, et al. (2001) The 1998 Floods in Bangladesh: Disaster Impacts, Household Coping Strategies, and Response. Research Report No. 122, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Duraiappah, AK (1998) Poverty and environmental degradation: a review and analysis of the nexus. World Development 26(12), 2169–2179.Google Scholar
Ebenstein, A, et al. (2015) Growth, pollution, and life expectancy: China from 1991–2012. The American Economic Review 105(5), 226–231.Google Scholar
Fay, M (2005) The Urban Poor in Latin America. Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forouzanfar, MH, et al. (2015) Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks in 188 countries, 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2013. The Lancet 386, 2287–2323.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fox, S (2014) The political economy of slums: theory and evidence from Sub-saharan Africa. World Development 54, 191–203.Google Scholar
Geographic Information Science and Technology (2015) Landscan Population Data, Oak Ridge, USA: Oak Ridge National Laboratory.Google Scholar
Gerber, N, Nkonya, E and von Braun, J (2014) Land degradation, poverty and marginality. In von Braun, J and Gatzweiler, FW (eds). Marginality. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, pp. 181–202.Google Scholar
Gordon, SB, et al. (2014) Respiratory risks from household air pollution in low and middle income countries. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 2(10), 823–860.Google Scholar
Grainger, CA and Costello, CJ (2014) Capitalizing property rights insecurity in natural resource assets. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 67(1), 224–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, LC and Moseley, WG (2005) A geographical perspective on poverty–environment interactions. The Geographical Journal 171, 9–23.Google Scholar
Hallegatte, S, et al. (2016) Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty. Climate Change and Development Series, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallegatte, S, et al. (2017) Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters. Climate Change and Development Series, Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Hansen, MC, et al. (2013) High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. Science 342, 850–853.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, I, et al. (2014) Updated high-resolution grids of monthly climatic observations – the CRU TS3.10 dataset. International Journal of Climatology 34, 623–642.Google Scholar
ISM and SINFONICA (2015) Users' Manual for Handling Resampled Micro Data of Vietnamese Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS). Tokyo, Japan: Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) and Statistical Information Institute for Consulting and Analysis (SINFONICA).Google Scholar
Khan, RK and Khan, RK (2009) Assessing poverty-deforestation links: evidence from swat, Pakistan. World Development 68, 2607–2618.Google Scholar
Kozel, V (2014) Well Begun but Not Yet Done: Progress and Emerging Challenges for Poverty Reduction in Vietnam. Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Lall, SV and Deichmann, U (2012) Density and disasters: economics of urban hazard risk. The World Bank Research Observer 27(1), 74–105.Google Scholar
Lanjouw, P, Marra, M and Nguyen, C (2013) Vietnam's Evolving Poverty map: Patterns and Implications for Policy. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 6355, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laurance, WF, Sayer, J and Cassman, KG (2014) Agricultural expansion and its impacts on tropical nature. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 29(1), 107–116.Google Scholar
Li, Y, et al. (2013) Rural livelihoods and climate variability in ningxia, northwest China. Climatic Change 119(3–4), 891–904.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locatelli, B, Pramova, E and Russell, A (2012) Using Forests to Enhance Resilience: What do we Know About how Forests can Contribute to Adaptation? Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Luong, LM, et al. (2017) The association between particulate air pollution and respiratory admissions among young children in Hanoi, Vietnam. Science of the Total Environment 578, 249–255.Google Scholar
Naipal, V, et al. (2015) Improving the global applicability of the RUSLE model-adjustment of the topographical and rainfall erosivity factors. Geoscientific Model Development 8, 2893–2913.Google Scholar
Narloch, U (2016) The Varying Income Effects of Weather Variation: Some Insights From Rural Vietnam. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 7764, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Narloch, U and Bangalore, M (2016) Environmental Risks and Poverty: Analyzing geo-Spatial and Household Data From Vietnam. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 7763, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noack, F, et al. (2015) Responses to Weather and Climate: A Cross-Section Analysis of Rural Incomes. World Bank Policy Research Working Series No. 7478, Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunn, N and Puga, D (2012) Ruggedness: the blessing of bad geography in Africa. Review of Economics and Statistics 94(1), 20–36.Google Scholar
Olinto, P, et al. (2013) The state of the poor: where are the poor, where is extreme poverty harder to end, and what is the current profile of the world's poor? Economic Premise, 2(125), 1–8. World Bank, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Opondo, DO (2013) Erosive coping after the 2011 floods in Kenya. International Journal of Global Warming 5, 452–466.Google Scholar
Panayotou, T (1997) Demystifying the environmental Kuznets curve: turning a black box into a policy tool. Environment and Development Economic 2(3), 465–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panayotou, T (2016) Economic growth and the environment. In Haen, N, Wilk, R and Harnish, A (eds). The Environment in Anthropology, 2nd edn., New York: NYU Press, pp. 140–148.Google Scholar
Pasanen, T, et al. (2017) Poverty–environment nexus in the Lao PDR: analysis of household survey data. Development Policy Review 35(2), 349–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perez-De-Rada, E and Paz, D (2008) Analisis de la Relacion entre Amenazas Naturales y Condiciones de Vida: El Caso de Bolivia. Research Report, United Nations Development Programme, New York City, USA.Google Scholar
Petley, D (2010) On the impact of climate change and population growth on the occurrence of fatal landslides in South, East and SE Asia. Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology 43, 487–496.Google Scholar
Petley, D (2012) Global patterns of loss of life from landslides. Geology 40, 927–930.Google Scholar
Pham, TT, et al. (2012) The Context of REDD + in Vietnam: Drivers, Agents and Institutions. Occasional Paper 75, Bogor, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).Google Scholar
Rabbani, G, Rahman, A and Mainuddin, K (2013) Salinity-induced loss and damage to farming households in coastal Bangladesh. International Journal of Global Warming 5(3), 400–415.Google Scholar
Ranger, N, et al. (2011) An assessment of the potential impact of climate change on flood risk in Mumbai. Climatic Change 104(1), 139–167.Google Scholar
Reardon, T and Vosti, SA (1995) Links between rural poverty and the environment in developing countries: asset categories and investment poverty. World Development 23, 1495–1506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sager, L (2016) Estimating the Effect of air Pollution on Road Safety Using Atmospheric Temperature Inversions. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Working paper no. 251. London, UK.Google Scholar
Scherr, S (2000) A downward spiral? Research evidence on the relationship between poverty and natural resource degradation. Food Policy 25, 479–498.Google Scholar
Sidle, RC, et al. (2006) Erosion processes in steep terrain – truths, myths, and uncertainties related to forest management in Southeast Asia. Forest Ecology and Management 224, 199–225.Google Scholar
Sietz, D, Choque, SEM and Lüdeke, MK (2012) Typical patterns of smallholder vulnerability to weather extremes with regard to food security in the Peruvian Altiplano. Regional Environmental Change 12(2), 489–505.Google Scholar
Sissoko, K, van Keulen, H, Verhagen, J, Tekken, V and Battaglini, A (2011) Agriculture, livelihoods and climate change in the West African Sahel. Regional Environmental Change 11(1), 119–125.Google Scholar
Sloan, S and Sayer, JA (2015) Forest resources assessment of 2015 shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries. Forest Ecology and Management, 352, 134–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sodhi, NS, et al. (2010) Conserving Southeast Asian forest biodiversity in human-modified landscapes. Biological Conservation 143, 2375–2384.Google Scholar
Stern, DI (2004) The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Development 32(8), 1419–1439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tansley, G, et al. (2017) The correlation between poverty and access to essential surgical care in Ghana: a geospatial analysis. World Journal of Surgery 41(2), 639–643.Google Scholar
Thomas, T, et al. (2010) Natural Disasters and Household Welfare: Evidence From Vietnam. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 5491, Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Tschakert, P (2007) Views from the vulnerable: understanding climatic and other stressors in the Sahel. Global Environmental Change 17(2), 381–396.Google Scholar
Tucker, J, et al. (2015) Social vulnerability in three high-poverty climate change hot spots: what does the climate change literature tell us. Regional Environmental Change 15(5), 783–800.Google Scholar
Vezina, K, Bonn, F and Van, CP (2006) Agricultural land-use patterns and soil erosion vulnerability of watershed units in Vietnam's northern highlands. Landscape Ecology 21, 1311–1325.Google Scholar
Von Braun, J, et al. (2013) The Economics of Land Degradation. ZEF Working Paper No. 109. Bonn, Germany: Center for Development Research.Google Scholar
Vu, QM, et al. (2014a) Socio-economic and biophysical determinants of land degradation in Vietnam: an integrated causal analysis at the national level. Land Use Policy 36, 605–617.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vu, QM, Le, QB and Vlek, PL (2014b) Hotspots of human-induced biomass productivity decline and their social–ecological types toward supporting national policy and local studies on combating land degradation. Global Planetary Change 121, 64–77.Google Scholar
Watmough, GR, et al. (2016) Understanding the evidence base for poverty-environment relationships using remotely sensed satellite data: an example from Assam, India. World Development 78, 188–2013.Google Scholar
Winsemius, H, et al. (2015) Disaster Risk, Climate Change, and Poverty: Assessing the Global Exposure of Poor People to Floods and Droughts. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series No. 7480, Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Wodon, Q, Liverani, A and Joseph, G (2014) Climate Change and Migration: Evidence From the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, DC: A World Bank study.Google Scholar
World, Bank Group (2016) Vietnam – Systematic Country Diagnostic: Priorities for Poverty Reduction, Shared Prosperity and Sustainability. Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Wunder, S, et al. (2014) Safety nets, gap filling and forests: a global-comparative perspective. World Development, Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation 64(suppl. 1), S29–S42.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, FJ and Carter, MR (2003) Asset smoothing, consumption smoothing and the reproduction of inequality under risk and subsistence constraints. Journal of Development Economics 71(1), 233–260.Google Scholar
Zulu, LC and Richardson, RB (2013) Charcoal, livelihoods, and poverty reduction: evidence from sub-Saharan Africa. Energy for Sustainable Development 17(1), 127–137.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Narloch and Bangalore supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Narloch and Bangalore supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 759.5 KB