In China, and elsewhere, long-term economic development and poverty alleviation need to be balanced against the likelihood of ecological failure. Here, we show how paleoenvironmental records can provide important multidecadal perspectives on ecosystem services (ES). More than 50 different paleoenvironmental proxy records can be mapped to a wide range of ES categories and subcategories. Lake sediments are particularly suitable for reconstructing records of regulating services, such as soil stability, sediment regulation, and water purification, which are often less well monitored.

Though much intellectual energy has been expended on the “poverty problem” in India, the debate simply does not take into account the highly unequal social context in which poverty is produced and reproduced. Can we reflect on the right not to be poor without taking on these background inequalities? Arguably, the right not to be poor is best articulated as a subset of the generic right to equality. The concept of equality is, however, not self-explanatory. In many circles, redistributive justice has replaced equality. It is therefore time to ask the question – equality for what?

Analysis of poverty and its dimensions are various as the ways in which poverty affects the daily sustenance of the poor. Poverty, many a times is simply viewed as an issue of income. What poverty means for the poor is a wide range of dynamic aspects. This paper presents results of analysis that emanate from Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) which was conducted in Sohenkhera village, Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, entire households of the village were covered for the study.

An exogenously defined poverty line yields poverty headcounts between any two points in time that are a net outcome of the two-way traffic into and out of poverty. This paper argues that, for the rural Indian context, where housing is too lumpy and illiquid to be used for consumption smoothing, transitions in housing quality in cross-sectional data sets can provide revealed evidence of household perceptions of downside risk to their current consumption levels.