BIODIVERSITY & THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, 189 world leaders agreed to a set of time-bound and measurable goals for combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. These Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focus the efforts of the world community on achieving significant improvements in people’s lives by the year 2015.
Although Goal 7 focuses on ensuring environmental sustainability, there is no specific mention of biodiversity within the MDGs. However, it is widely recognized that the achievement of many of the MDGs will preclude the conservation of biodiversity. Accordingly, attempts are increasingly being made to mainstream biodiversity into the MDGs.
Aside from Goal 7, the conservation of biodiversity will be especially necessary for Goals 1, 4, 5 and 6.
>> Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Targets for 2015: Halve the proportion of people whose income is less that $1 a day; halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Currently, about 1.2 billion people subsist on $1 a day or less, and close to 3 billion live on $2 a day or less. Many of these, the world's poorest people directly depend on biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides. These 'free' services include the provision of clean water, the cycling of nutrients, the replenishment of soil fertility, and the prevention of erosion. If they are impaired or degraded, extreme poverty and hunger are more difficult to address and overcome.
Aside from the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity contributes to poverty reduction and the eradication of hunger in at least four important areas:
1) Food security. Human society depends heavily on genetic resources for food, from wild as well as agricultural systems. These resources also provide communities with the capacity to adapt varieties capable of coping better with changing local conditions. Biodiversity is also an important source of alternative foods during periods of scarcity.
2) Health improvements. Biodiversity is a source of raw materials that underpin medicinal and health care systems, both for the informal and formal sectors. Poor people also suffer most from water and air pollution, water scarcity and from diseases associated with disrupted ecosystems.
3) Income generation. Poor people tend to be those most directly dependent upon the utilization of biodiversity for their livelihoods and are therefore the first to suffer when these resources are degraded or lost. Biodiversity also offers the potential for marketing unique products, many of which are extremely valuable – but whose sale seldom benefits the people who harvest them.
4) Reduced vulnerability. Poor people are most often exposed to, and least prepared to cope with, unpredictable events such as fluctuations in access to food and water and to environmental shocks and risks. Ecosystem degradation exacerbates the frequency and impact of droughts, floods, landslides, forest fires and other natural disasters, and can intensify competition and the potential for conflict over access to shared resources such as food and water.
In many areas of the world, the capacity of biodiversity to deliver these critical benefits to the poor is diminishing. Poverty and hunger are worsening as ecosystems unravel and water and soil resources are degraded through over-use.
Achieving MDG 1 will in large part depend on halting this widespread degradation of biodiversity, and the resultant collapse of the ecosystem services that contribute in numerous ways to the productive activities of both the rural and urban poor.
Goal 1 is intimately linked to agricultural productivity and the yield of fisheries, which provide livelihoods for millions of the rural and urban poor. Globally, about 2 billion people lack food security and some 825 million are chronically malnourished, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). These numbers reflect the deteriorating conditions of agricultural land, particularly irrigated land. The causes of this deterioration can be considered under five main heads, all related to the loss of biodiversity:
1) Limited arable land. Most fertile land is already under cultivation. The poor, pushed off more productive land, are often forced into marginal areas, instigating a cascading effect of land impoverishment and degradation.
2) Shrinking size of family farms. In most poor developing countries, family farms have been divided into smaller and smaller parcels for each new (and larger) generation of heirs. Population growth alone has shrunk by half the average family farm over the past four decades, causing families to farm marginal, unproductive land or clear forests (contributing to deforestation and soil erosion).
3) Land degradation. Each year, land degradation claims some 5 to 7 million hectares of farmland. Worse, nearly 2 billion hectares of crop and grazing land are suffering from moderate to severe soil degradation – an area the size of Canada and the US combined. In some areas, such as Kazakhstan, fertile topsoil is being depleted 300 times faster than nature can replenish it.
4) Shrinking genetic base for cultivars. Of 7,000 plant species grown for food, only 150 varieties are commercially important and of these, just four – rice, wheat and maize – are the staple foods for four billion people. As a result of habitat loss and lack of crop diversification, 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of crops has been lost over the past 100 years.
5) Over-harvesting of marine and freshwater stocks. According to the FAO, close to 70 per cent of the world’s commercial marine fish stocks are “fully exploited, over-fished, depleted or slowly recovering.” Two-thirds of commercially valuable marine species are in decline.
>> Goals 4 and 5: Reducing child mortality and improving maternal health
Goal 4 Target: Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.
Goal 5 Target: Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.
For many women poor health starts early and affects the whole course of their lives. Malnutrition is often the root cause. Girls who receive chronically inadequate diets grow into malnourished women who suffer from anemia and protein energy deficiencies. Their physical development may be impaired, making childbirth difficult and dangerous.
The loss or impoverishment of biodiversity has a direct impact on maternal and infant health. Functioning ecosystems provide a cornucopia of plant and animal foods, which can supplement and improve diets dependent largely on one or two staple crops. These sources of food become critical when crops fail because of drought, floods or inadequate supplies of freshwater during peak growing seasons. Healthy ecosystems also filter and clean water, and provide access to fuel-wood and fodder, reducing the amount of time women and girls must spend in fetching these essential supplies. Studies in Burkina Faso, Uganda and Zambia indicate that women and girls could save hundreds of hours a year if walking to sources of fuel-wood and water were reduced to 30 minutes or less.
As a direct result of ecosystem degradation and climate change, lack of access to freshwater has imperiled local development in many areas. UNICEF estimates that girls and women in Africa spend 40 billion hours a year hauling water to their homes from sources up to 15 kilometers away. In Gujarat State, India, women spend up to six hours a day hauling water from distant sources to their homes. This effects women’s health: they suffer from chronic backache, painful feet, general weakness and fatigue.
>> Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Targets: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS; Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
As the World Bank has estimated, nearly 20 per cent of the disease burden in developing countries is linked to ecosystem deterioration, which results in insufficient and unsafe drinking water, lack of sanitation (which also fouls drinking water supplies), disease vectors such as mosquitoes, and indoor and outdoor air pollution.
The burden of disease due to major environmental health risks is comparable to that from malnutrition – another factor linked intimately to ecosystem integrity and state of biodiversity.
Every year in developing countries some 7 million people die prematurely from environment-related diseases: 3 million from water-related diseases; 2 million from indoor air pollution caused by poorly ventilated stoves and cooking fires; 1 million from urban air pollution; and 1 million from malaria.
The spread of malaria, dengue fever, river blindness and a host of other diseases are linked to the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity. Forest clearance in particular has hastened the spread of malaria by creating breeding areas for the anopheles mosquito. Malaria studies in West Africa have shown a close correlation between human encroachment on forests and a rise in the occurrence of the disease. Malaria is also thought to be spreading in the mining areas of the Amazon Basin where deforestation continues unabated.
By disrupting ecosystems and their array of biodiversity, humanity has upset a number of finely tuned natural balances among predators and prey, and among hosts, vectors and parasites in plants, animals and humans. This protective function of biodiversity is not well understood. Examples of infectious diseases linked to the disruption of ecosystem functions include: malaria and leishmaniasis through deforestation; Lyme disease through changes in the number of acorns and in populations of black-legged ticks, white-footed mice and white-tailed deer; Argentine hemorrhagic fever through the replacement of natural grasslands with maize monocultures; and cholera through increased algal blooms, secondary in part to warming seas and to fertilizer and sewage discharge.
Ecologists have begun to describe what might be termed an ‘Environmental Distress Syndrome’ to identify deteriorating environmental conditions and growing threats to human health. Paul Epstein, Associate Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, lists five symptoms of this syndrome:
1) Re-emerging infectious diseases, such as cholera, typhoid and pneumonia and the emergence of new ones, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis and human reproductive disorders linked to industrial chemicals.
2) Loss of biodiversity and the consequent loss of potential sources of new drugs and crops.3) The growing dominance of generalist species such as crows and Canadian geese.
4) The decline in pollinators, such as bees, birds, bats, butterflies and beetles, organisms which are indispensable for the preservation of flowering plants, including food crops.
5) Proliferation of harmful algal blooms along the world’s coastlines, leading to more deadly outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Such trends pose a disturbing question: at what point might the depletion of the world’s ecological and biophysical capital rebound against the health of humanity?
The linkages between biodiversity and the MDGs were discussed in detail at a meeting in London from 2-4 March, 2003.
Full meeting report
'Biodiversity After Johannesburg' explored the critical role of biodiversity and ecosystem services in achieving the MDGs.
Online resources:
UN Millennium Development Goals homepage
Millennium Project
The Millennium Project's research focuses on identifying the operational priorities, organizational means of implementation, and financing structures necessary to achieve the MDGs.
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