Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

The environment is recognized as the basis of the recently approved Sustainable Development Goals of the UN; nevertheless, most of the literature still focuses only on its impacts on a rural environment and rural poverty. The Kuznets Curve hypothesis validity continues to bind only people with scares resources with environmental quality. However, cities have become the basic habitat of the world population becoming not only useful but also necessary, to identify the differences and specificities of the relationship between poverty and the environment. This systematic review of the literature follows the steps suggested by Khan, Kunz, Kleijnen, and Antes in 2003. Web of Science and EBSCO were the search engines used and the research was conducted in Spanish and English. In urban environments, powerful arguments exist to suggest the reversal of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis; since the analysis shows that poverty, inequality, government failures, and the lack of access to public goods are the main factors that determine environmental poverty. In addition, the different manifestations of environmental poverty exacerbate poverty understood as income poverty. Thus, environmental poverty generates an infinite spiral of poverty and degradation of natural capital, not only in rural areas or low income but in urban areas. The literature analysis allowed us to identify some research gaps. In particular, it is detected that noise, access to green areas, clean energy, and its relation to urban poverty are incipient in the literature, demonstrating that urban poverty has a particular relationship with environmental poverty.