How The Environment Should be Addressed re: the MDG

The Role of the Environment

Environmental sustainability is an important human goal in and of itself. A goal recognized time and again at local, national and international fora.

The recently released Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the collective outcome of over 2,000 scientists from around the world, makes one more compelling case for how nature is central to human wellbeing and the services we derive from it, and how threatened those services are today.

Healthy natural systems provide a wide range of goods and services to the poor including food, non-timber products, fisheries products, shelter, crop biodiversity, plus all of the various services including regulating and stabilization ecological systems.�

Only Addressing the Environment Separately?

In the overall MDG framework addressing all eight MDGs in a simultaneous and mutually reinforcing way, rather than individually, can result in larger and long-lasting achievements. Failure to do so risks undermining narrow sectoral advances.

Take the case of poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability. Some in the development community tend to think of environmental sustainability as a far in the future concern, therefore of little relevance to the pressing concerns of the worlds poor. However, unsustainable development is in many cases creates immediate and problematic realities such as water scarcity or highly polluted freshwater systems.

Furthermore, current poverty reduction strategies, focused on urban and export-led job creation simply bypass a large portion of the poor, namely the rural poor, who are left to generate livelihoods from shrinking natural resources. For them, development without environmental conservation can result in short-lived improvement or no improvements at all.

From the other side environmental conservation faces a similar dilemma. In developing countries, investing in environmental sustainability and biodiversity conservation without bringing the rural poor on board often produces only temporary success.