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This chapter attempts to situate the environmental problems of the urban poor in their international environmental context and to draw some action-oriented conclusions. It discusses urban environmental transitions, provides the rough outlines of such a transition and link affluence to the scale and timing of environmental burdens. The chapter argues that with increasing affluence, environmental burdens tend to become spatially more diffuse, temporally more delayed, and causally less directly threatening. It also focuses on local environmental problems in low-income settlements, again using examples from Accra, Jakarta and So Paulo. The level of poverty is taken to be such that most households in the settlements are not offered environmental amenities such as in-house piped water, sewers, and door-to-door waste collection, and would not be willing to pay for such services if they were offered. The socio-cultural …