The principle and main structure design on national database of poverty, environment, and development in China

Poverty is listed as the one of eight "Millennium Development Goals" by UN Summit. From 1978 to 2004, rural poverty population in China is cut to 26.1 million from 250 million. In order to support the decision maker to make nice planning in elimination of poverty and promotion of regional sustainable development in China, the GIS based systemic and comprehensive database for poverty, environment and development is proposed and designed in the paper. Additionally, the design principle and main content of the database is discussed by utilization modern technology, such as spatialtemporal and tree-ring data models for data structuring and coding, in order to represent current poverty status, spatial distribution and temporal variations, and to explore the relationship among poverty, environment and development ultimately.