The key Millennium Goal of halving poverty in a decade cannot be met without better environmental protection, according to a new report.
The World Resources 2005 document says that most of the world's poor depend on nature for their income.
Its authors say a focus on aid has taken attention away from more complex issues such as the environment.
The report is endorsed by the UN, and comes two weeks before a major summit to review progress on the Goals.
"In the Millennium Goals, the environment was treated as an afterthought"
World Resources is a biennial publication from the US-based research group the World Resources Institute (WRI).
The release of this year's edition, sub-titled Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty, is particularly pertinent, coming as it does in the run-up to the UN World Summit, which will see representatives of more than 190 countries gather in New York to review progress on the Millennium Goals adopted by world leaders five years ago.
The first and possibly most important of those goals is to halve the number of people living in poverty, defined as less than US$1 per day, by 2015. This a particular issue for sub-Saharan Africa.
"We have the Millennium Goals summit coming up, we have Tony Blair making Africa and poverty a major theme within the G8 - there's never been a time when poverty has been higher on the agenda," the WRI's President Jonathan Lash told the BBC News website.
"But if we don't make the key linkages between poverty, the environment and good governance, it will be impossible to achieve the poverty target.
"Seventy-five percent of the world's poor are rural poor, who depend directly on natural systems for their livelihood."
Making the case
The report presents five case studies to reinforce its argument that environmental protection and poverty alleviation go hand in hand.
But Jonathan Lash is pessimistic that the link between environmental protection and poverty is understood at the highest level.
"In the Millennium Goals, the environment was treated as an afterthought," he told the BBC News website.
"And I think there has been a tendency to focus on big global-scale issues like aid, trade and debt relief; these things are necessary but not sufficient.
"Focussing on the needs of the rural poor is harder because it tends to go one community at a time, and it doesn't give the quick payback that I think we sometimes demand of global leaders - you know, 'do something big that we can see on our TV screens tonight'."
But unless the importance of the environment is grasped and acted upon, the report concludes that the key Millennium Goal on poverty will not be met.
Disappearing world
A foreword co-written by senior figures in the World Bank and the United Nations Environment and Development Programmes notes the devastating figures which emerged earlier this year from a four-year study of global environmental decline, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment:
This is the latest in a stream of reports which have publicly doubted the will and ability of the global community to ensure the Goals are met, particularly in Africa, though it is unique so far in linking that lack of progress to environmental concerns.
There is also concern that leaders of the developed world have chosen to downgrade the importance of the Millennium Goals at the World Summit, which opens on 14 September, and focus instead on security and terrorism.
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