Without overcoming poverty, there is no sustainability

 

Everything we consider valuable for a full life depends on one thing: the value society produces. The food on our tables, the roofs over our heads, health, education, and time to relax and enjoy ourselves all exist because millions of people and businesses create value every day. That capacity to produce is what allows a society to improve how it lives. And that is why poverty should matter so much to us: the poor lack these possibilities and pursue their survival within a very precarious and limited set of options.

This calls for rethinking a debate that is almost always framed backwards. The problem with the world is not that some people enjoy a great deal of well-being and have their needs met. The problem is that others can’t meet even the most basic ones. The problem is poverty, not wealth. And although the two are often confused, poverty and inequality are different things. You can reduce inequality without lifting anyone out of poverty, simply by lowering the incomes of the richest. And you can reduce poverty without touching inequality, if everyone’s income grows, even if it grows faster for some than for others.

This distinction is key to talking about sustainability. Environmental degradation has many sources, not just the production of value. A very large share comes from rapid population growth and from the activities poor people undertake to survive. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, demand for firewood and charcoal, the spread of subsistence farming, and overgrazing are eating away at forests and soils. In India, hundreds of millions of households still cook with firewood or dung, which puts pressure on forests. On top of that come poor production practices, which in poor countries create enormous externalities: dead rivers, destroyed jungles, and lost biodiversity. No one does this by choice. Neither the person who cuts down a tree to cook nor the one who pollutes a river to get by has any other alternative within reach.

It’s worth being precise here: environmental damage doesn’t come from poverty alone. Wealthier economies and households produce most of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and that is a real and serious impact. But it is not the only kind of impact on nature, and it differs in a fundamental way from the other: the emissions of the wealthy can be reduced through technology and changes in business models, something their own income allows them to finance. The damage that stems from poverty, such as the dead rivers, destroyed jungles, and lost biodiversity left behind by poor production practices, cannot be solved without first overcoming poverty itself.

There is an economic idea that helps explain this: the environmental Kuznets curve. It says that when a country starts to grow, environmental degradation tends to rise, because the priority is to survive and produce. But once average income passes a certain threshold, the opposite happens: degradation falls, because there are now resources to invest in clean technology and because people begin to demand better environmental conditions. It is neither a recipe nor an automatic promise, just an observation of what has actually happened around the world. It is positive economics, not normative: it describes what happens, not what should happen.

The same mechanisms show up on a small scale. A business surviving on razor-thin margins can’t invest in a more sustainable business model, because it has nothing left over to do so. A household that cooks with firewood can’t switch technologies without more income. Until they have some breathing room, they will keep causing the same impact, not for lack of willingness, but for lack of real alternatives.

A clear example is illegal gold mining in the Colombian jungle, which is destroying an ecosystem that is vital to the balance of the planet. Why does it happen? Because many people have no other way to earn a living. They lack access to education, technical training, and better-paid jobs. If they had them, they would probably never consider extracting gold at the risk of their lives and at the cost of the rainforest. Treating the problem solely as a matter of security or justice, by sending in law enforcement, doesn’t get at the root cause and, at best, just moves the activity somewhere else. A more realistic approach would be to formalize the sector and improve the technology used to extract gold, reducing environmental harm while the region builds, over time, the capacity to move into more sustainable industries.

China shows how this logic works on a large scale. It raised its people’s incomes dramatically, not by redistributing what it already had, but by generating broad, real growth. And, in keeping with the Kuznets curve, sustainability has become a central pillar of public policy in its recent plans. First, poverty is tackled broadly; then comes the ability to protect the environment.

Colombia, by contrast, offers a warning about what can go wrong when poverty is confused with inequality. The policies of Gustavo Petro’s government have bet, on one hand, on redistributing wealth in a country where even the richest have a relatively low income by global standards, and on the other, on halting oil exploration, an activity that weighs heavily on the country’s exports and on government revenue. If you take income away from those with the greatest capacity to invest in clean technology, you don’t transfer that capacity to the poor. You simply destroy value. And any reduction in the capacity to create value immediately hurts people’s ability to provide for their own well-being. With less oil revenue, the state has fewer resources to fund precisely what matters most, which is reducing poverty. So instead of speeding up the transition to sustainability, the policy can end up slowing it down.

This brings us to a central idea: poverty is not just a lack of money, it is a lack of capabilities. That is why pure redistribution, without growth, rarely solves the underlying problem. You can give a poor person more money, but without access to education, technical training, or technology, they will stay trapped in the same methods as before, the most destructive ones. Real change happens when people and businesses gain the capacity to transform how they produce and consume, and that almost always comes from economic growth, not from simple transfers of resources.

On top of this comes the population factor, which reinforces everything above. As family incomes rise, the number of children tends to fall, because education, health, and opportunities improve, especially for women. Rising income thus produces a double dividend: it funds cleaner technology and eases demographic pressure on forests, water, and soil. It is a race between two speeds. If population grows faster than the ability to change technology, the forests lose; if income wins the race, the pressure on resources eases.

In the climate change debate, an appealing but mistaken idea often comes up: that the underlying problem is economic growth itself and that the solution is to slow it down, with redistribution of what already exists being enough. That idea overlooks the fact that producing value is what makes it possible to live well, and that development is not, by definition, the destruction of ecosystems. There are many ways to design how value is created, some that deplete natural capital and others that protect or even restore it. That depends on the business model and the technology chosen, not on growth itself. Halting growth doesn’t change those choices. It only keeps everyone stuck with the same polluting technologies and condemns the poorest to remain without alternatives.

Today there is a genuine global movement toward sustainability. Companies in every sector are rethinking their business models, countries are transforming their energy mixes, and it is likely that within the next ten to fifteen years we will see an enormous shift in how the world produces and consumes energy. That is a real reason for optimism.

But that transformation won’t reach everyone unless poverty is confronted head-on. Those who can’t escape the subsistence trap will remain in destructive practices, not out of a lack of environmental awareness, but out of a lack of alternatives. The task ahead is not to argue over who has more and who has less, but to ensure that every person and every country can generate the value, income, and capabilities needed to live with dignity and join this change. Only then will sustainability stop being a privilege of rich countries and become a shared reality.

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