Poverty and Environment Links in the Brazilian Urban Area

Abstract

Abstrat: Diverse are the damages generated to the environment by urban growth. Some are local problems and others affect the planet as a whole, however the impact of the environment degradation is different between poor and rich, almost always they affect the poor people in the most perverse way, inflicting serious damages to the poor since their lives depend on the use of natural resources and their life conditions offer them little protection against air, water and ground pollution. From another point of view, poverty can induce the poor people to depredate even more the natural resources and to degrade the environment. Generating a vicious circle, reducing the income, the entitlements, livelihoods, and the survival of the poor people. This article aimed to make a statistics analysis using as proxy for poverty, not the per capita income, but an ampler index and with some dimensions, as the human development index, HDI. Moreover, to verify the action of the people on the environment, the percentage of domiciles without access to sanitation was used as proxy for the ambient degradation and the percentage of domiciles with access to the service of garbage collection as well, to find out one of the links between poverty and environment in urban Brazil.