Poor families often lack the resources to avoid degrading their environment. The very poor, struggling at the edge of subsistence, are pre-occupied with day-to-day survival. It is not that the poor have inherently short horizons, poor communities often have a strong ethic of stewardship in managing their traditional lands. But their fragile and limited resources, their often poorly defined property rights (institutional arrangements), and their limited access to credit and insurance markets prevent them from investing as much as they should in environmental protection. Thus, poverty results in environmental degradation, and excessive population growth in such a situation compounds the adverse impact of poverty on environmental degradation. In such a situation, to eke out a livelihood, distressed migration takes place from the rural areas. However, literature on rural-urban migration in developing countries has viewed the problem from a different perspective. In the early phases, rural-urban migration was considered desirable as it helped the growth of industrial sector. Over time, it was found that migration far exceeded the rate of employment creation in urban areas, which is due to distressed migration caused by rural poverty and environmental degradation. As the poor derived a greater proportion of their livelihoods from the common property resources to the disadvantage of the natural environment and a decline in the livelihood base for the majority of the poor, which triggers the "tragedy of the commons" phenomenon and distressed rural-urban migration further.
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