by Curtis Runyan

In his office crammed with neatly shelved stacks of paper, environmental researcher Norbert Henninger has not spent the last two years solving dilemmas about endangered species, acid rain, global warming, or any other traditional green issue.

Instead, Henninger, who is the deputy director of the Information Program at the World Resources Institute, has been tackling what he considers one of the biggest environmental issues confronting the next century: poverty.

“You simply cannot address environmental problems without tackling issues of poverty as well,” says Henninger. “They are interlinked. More than anyone else, poor people depend on the land where they live, and that makes them especially vulnerable to environmental degradation.”

That means droughts, floods, forest fires, and other natural disasters most frequently take the heaviest toll on the impoverished. And it also means that when hard times hit, the poor have no choice but to sell or consume the limited assets provided by their land. For instance, if a drought forces a poor farmer to overwork the land and degrade the topsoil, or earn money by clearing the forests that help store ground water, the land becomes less resilient and more vulnerable to future droughts and other natural disasters.

Henninger thinks that this sort of problem can be prevented in a good deal of cases by using the right tools. One of these new tools that are already being used with increasing frequency is poverty mapping, which helps countries better define and locate poor regions and communities.

For example, the World Food Program is using poverty maps in Cambodia to help program staff target the poorest districts for food aid. The broad strokes of national-level data can obscure pockets of poverty within more affluent regions. “With poverty mapping we are able to move away from nation-wide indicators because they hide the regional disparities,” he said.

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is using maps to reconfigure its tax revenue distribution formula. Instead of granting money based only on the size of a city, the state will redistribute more than $1 billion in tax revenues to poorer cities that are making efforts to invest in health, education, sanitation, and environmental conservation. In Madagascar, the government is working with the aid organization CARE to map both poverty and vulnerability to natural disasters.

Poverty maps combine census data with on-the-ground sample surveys to give a more detailed picture of where the poor live. This can help governments more equitably distribute funds for schools, health care, transportation, and the like. The maps also provide easy to understand tools for poor communities to agitate for a fair share of resources.

For instance, the World Bank has been using poverty maps to help Guatemala develop a road-building plan. Overlaying a poverty map of the country with road data reveals that there is a close correlation between lack of roads and poverty. That means people living in many poor communities are faced with high travel times and minimal access to basic services. The World Bank plans to use this data to guide its investment of $100 million in the country’s road network.

While a growing number of countries are using these maps, Henninger sees a number of new ways to employ this technology. “We are trying to find other variables to plug into these maps, environmental variables like access to water and sanitation, or what kind of ecosystem services, such as flood and disease control, there are in a region,” said Henninger.

This type of new use for poverty mapping has been employed in South Africa with great success, saving hundreds of lives. The government combined information from a poverty map with information on sanitation and safe water supplies to create a targeted, on-the-ground strategy for halting a cholera outbreak in the KwaZulu Natal province in 2001.

The country’s health, water, and statistics agencies worked together to create maps showing high-risk areas. The maps showed that cholera was following river floodplain, moving through and toward poor areas. Health officials warned people to boil water and take other preventative measures. Thanks to the information from the maps, the government was able to contain the outbreak within three months, and stop cold the fatality rate at 0.22 percent (the fatality rate for cholera is usually 10 percent of those infected).

In a lot of cases, says Henninger, better environmental management can help reduce the vulnerability of the poor. While it is easy to calculate the value of ecosystem goods like water and food, it is more difficult to quantify ecosystem services like flood control, climate regulation, disease control, and spiritual values. Poverty maps can help government officials better understand the relationship between ecosystem services and poverty, and to create new opportunities for poverty reduction and better resource management.

“These maps have the potential to greatly influence public decisions,” says Henninger. “When maps get in the public domain, you can raise public awareness – it becomes crystal clear when you see on a map that resources aren’t going into poor neighborhoods.” (WRI Features, 835 words)