Poverty refers to a situation and process of serious deprivation or lack of resources and materials necessary for living within a minimum standard conducive to human dignity and well-being. It is a situation whereby the basic necessities of man are either totally absent or exists in negligible quantities or state to make a meaningful impacts.
Sociologists refers to poverty as a social problem because it affect a number of people in a way considered unacceptable. In simplistic terms, a nation or state is said to be poor when she can not provide her citizens with certain basic amenities such as shelter, good roads, portable water, medical services and employment opportunities. (okonkwo 2000) in (Franca Obi 2001). Poverty is said to be of two categories viz: absolute and relative poverty.
Absolute Poverty: This refers to extreme inadequacy in the essentials of food, clothing and shelter. It means malnutrition or starvation, chronic ill-health, low life expectancy,rags and slums, etc.
Whereas relative poverty is comparative, it is a question of inequality. It does not pose much problem. It is taken as a way of life, as stratification, inequality is present in any human group because all men are not equally endowed with talents and opportunities.
Damage to the environment has three potential costs to present and future human welfare. Human health may be harmed, economic productivity may be reduced and the pleasure or satisfaction obtain from an unspoiled environment, often referred to as its "Amenity" value may be lost. Poor people do not have enough food with regards to quality and quantity, they lived in an overcrowded households and every other source of living is grossly inadequate. There seem to be a high correlation between poverty and environmental degradation.
In developing countries of the world poverty constitutes a major impingement and exerts disastrous effect on the environment, Any poor society must operates below the minimum acceptable poverty level and as such can't be a healthy society,it is the general believe that poor countries do not have the facilities let alone the knowledge base to fight environmental problems, thus living an exertion on the environment.
Social status has a prominent role to play in this regards, poor societies are bound to operates at a subsistence and crude level and these cultivates lots of exertion on the environment as a vast majority of both rural and urban dwellers scavenged daily for biomass and other source of energy in the same environment.
According to the World Commission on Environment and Development in "Our Common Future" (1987): They maintained that Poverty pollutes the environment, creating environment stress in different ways. Those who are poor and hungry will often destroy their immediate environment in order to survive. They will cut down our forests, overgraze our grassland with their livestock, overuse marginal land and overcrowd the urban cities. The cumulative effects of all of these changes is so far-reaching as to make poverty in itself a major global scourge.
Indeed, there exist a relationship between rural poverty and environmental degradation. poverty forces the rural populace to mine the planet's resources without any concern for conservation, thus speeding up the level of impoverishment and environmental degradation with one reinforcing the other in an endless chain of destruction.
With the foregoing, it will be adduced that poverty is a crime and an enemy to our survival on planet earth and must be curtailed to a minimum level, otherwise its exerted influence on the environment will cause a proportionate damage to our existence. Efforts should be made by the government worldwide to ameliorate the problem, by bridging the gap of unemployment, reducing corruption through graft agencies, empowering the masses through poverty alleviation programs and organizing birth control seminars to create awareness to the citizenry on the necessity to have a manageable number of children per household.
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