Green Gifts: Linking poverty and the environment

TEAR Australia's partners focus on poverty-reduction projects, supporting the efforts of the most vulnerable people to work towards their own development. Many of our partners, and the communities they work with, see poverty and the environment as inter-connected. As these marginalised communities work to improve their quality of life, they also seek to maintain, and work to improve, the quality of their environment.

Green Gifts are those that seek to address social, economic and health problems in ways which are sustainable within the environment, and which enable communities to build resilience to environmental challenges that may threaten their well-being.

Families with the fewest resources - those who are socially and economically isolated - are also those most likely to be ecologically vulnerable. Their land is the furthest from the clean water, their suburbs most polluted, their houses first to flood in the monsoon, and their trees most likely to be felled for fuel. They are also the ones most likely to be impacted by climate change.

TEAR's Green Gifts enable us to support the efforts of vulnerable communities as they respond and adjust to environmental challenges.

You can find out how each Green Gift is green when you browse that item.