MDGs: Achieving True Sustainable Development

Creating Better Conditions for Poverty Reduction and Environmental Sustainability

To bring about true sustainable development the current shortcomings of urban focused, growth oriented development strategies that mine the rural environments of the world must be reversed. Country governments, international agencies and others involved in the achievement of the MDGs should:

• Invest more in combined poverty reduction and environmental sustainability initiatives
• Ensure that all sectoral initiatives, particularly agriculture and other natural resource based development initiatives fully address the environmental sustainability challenges and opportunities
• Ensure that environmental sustainability and conservation initiatives fully address the poverty reduction challenges and opportunities

Livelihoods, Conservation and Rural Development

In order to improve the livelihoods of the majority of the world’s poor and foster rural conservation, rural development must be given central stage in national development strategies, but it needs to go beyond the current push for more production and increased market access. It needs to include also:

• Establishing institutions that are accessible and responsive to small farmers' and peasants' needs
• Supporting the building of social capital through empowerment, capacity building and economic support
• Creating coherence among local, regional and national frameworks so that local level pro-poor, pro-environment initiatives find supportive regional and national level policies and institutions
• Increasing, improving and securing access by the rural poor to the natural resource base, hence clarifying rights and responsibilities for natural resource management
• Integrating sustainable environmental management into rural development and making it profitable to rural producers;
• Acknowledging and improving the role of rural communities as stewards of rural environments and compensating these activities through payment for environmental services schemes

WWF’s Challenge to the Development Community

WWF and others in the conservation movement have learned that to be sustainable, conservation programs in developing countries need to be pro-poor, empower rural communities and open new opportunities to increase their incomes and assets. We challenge the development community to make a similar acknowledgement, namely that achieving long-lasting poverty alleviation is intimately tied to investing in environmental sustainability.