The word “development” is synonymous to economic growth in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 8. We know however that after Amartya Sen’s 1999 book “Development as Freedom”, development did not mean increased income per capita but a decrease in poverty and a wide exercising of capabilities and of freedom of choice. How was the measurement of the decrease in poverty to be operationalized? The answer was the MDP index (multidimensional poverty index), and previously also the HDI (human development index), where income per capita is one of three factors. In this article, we highlight the multi-criteria approach of the MDP Index that captures the multiple deprivations poor people experience with respect not so much to income as to health, education, and living standards. We notice however the lack of indicators of local and global environmental impoverishment in the MDP Index. In contrast, such dimensions are extremely visible in the Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDC) collected in the EJAtlas. People get impoverished by land and water grabbing, climate change, biocultural loss, the displacements caused by economic growth and the concomitant changes in the social metabolism. The poor complain and display different valuation languages. Sometimes they coalesce in movements for environmental justice against the socio-ecological deprivations they suffer. This paper therefore brings together ecological economics, political ecology and development economics emphasizing the clash between economic growth and the preservation and enhancement of the social and natural environment.