World Leaders Urged to Put ‘Natural Capital’ at Centre of Poverty Eradication
Speaking at a regional launch of a new United Nations report on the Millennium Development Goals, UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said "The goods and services delivered by nature including the atmosphere, forests, rivers, wetlands, mangroves and coral reefs are worth trillions of dollars".
"To fight poverty we need three kinds of capital--financial, human and environmental capital. When we damage natural capital we not only undermine our life support systems but the economic basis for current and future generations. Targeted investments in this natural capital has a high rate of return in terms of development," he said.
"While restoring them to health, after they have been damaged, is a costly and often time-consuming affair. So better to keep them intact than undermining them in the first place," said Mr Toepfer.
In September head of state will meet in New York to debate the reform of the UN and the status of the eight Goals.
These cover vital areas such as halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day and the reduction of child mortality to reversing forest loss and the empowerment of women.
The report launched today highlights good progress in many parts of the developing world towards meeting the Goals by 2015. However, it confirms that sub-Saharan Africa remains off-track in most if not all areas.
"We will enter the New York summit in the sure and certain knowledge that the environment is the oxygen that is breathing life into the Goals and their underlying indicators. This is made clear by numerous reports produced to inform heads of state attending the summit," said Mr Toepfer.
" So the environment is the red ribbon running around all our ambitions. I sincerely hope that this will be fully and finally recognised in the outcome of the summit. That 16 September will be truly a red ribbon day for the environment," he said.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the work of 1,300 scientists and experts from 95 countries in which UNEP has played a pivotal role, gives some of the first firm figures on the environment's economic value and thus its role in meeting the Goals.
It states that tropical mangroves, coastal ecosystems that are nurseries for fish, natural filters and coastal defenses, are worth around $1,000 a hectare when intact. Cleared for shrimp farms the same area of coast is worth only $ 200 a hectare.
The Assessment also puts a value on peat bogs and marshlands. It estimates that the Muthurajawela Marsh, a more than 3,000 hectare coastal bog in Sri Lanka is worth an estimated $5 million a year as a result of services such as local flood control.
Losses as a result of damage by alien, invasive species, in the Cape Floral region of South Africa is estimated at $93 million a year.
An intact wetland in Canada is valued at $6,000 a hectare whereas one cleared for intensive agriculture is worth about $2,000 a hectare.
Studies from Algeria, Italy, Portugal, Syria and Tunisia also point to the value of intact forests.
These estimate that the value of the timber and fuel-wood from a forest is worth less than a third when compared with the value of services such as water-shed protection, recreation and the absorption of pollutants like greenhouse gases.
The burning of 10 million hectares of Indonesia's forests in the late 1990s cost an estimated $9 billion as a result of factors such as increased health care and tourism losses.
Costs of restoring a damaged ecosystem back to health are also high. In the American state of Louisiana, billions of dollars is being spent to restore coastal marshes and wetlands as part of measures to reduce storm surges generated by hurricanes.
Mr Toepfer also highlighted new and emerging research on the importance of a healthy environment for reducing the spread of diseases.
Studies in the Amazon rainforest, for example, indicate that for every one per cent increase in deforestation, there is an eight per cent increase in the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
This has important implications for not only human health but the costs to society. Africa's Gross National Product in 2000 could have been 25 per cent or $100 billion larger if malaria had been eradicated some 35 years ago, say experts.
Mr Toepfer said he welcomed the various international initiatives aimed at mobilizing funds and political will on issues including Africa and climate change.
These include the announcement, made last week, on debt relief for African and Latin American countries and the initiatives by the Government of the United Kingdom under its presidency of the G8 including its Commission for Africa.
European Union nations recently pledged to move to a minimum overseas development aid amounting to 0.7 per cent of their economies.
Mr Toepfer also urged governments to back a substantial replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multi billion dollar fund which assists developing countries in environment and development projects, by the end at a key meeting in Japan in November.
UNEP, which along with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme is one of the three implementing agencies, has a current portfolio of projects worth around $1 billion.
"The GEF is one of the most important sources of funding for developing countries helping them in areas such as international waters, countering desertification of land, phasing out the chemicals that damage the ozone layer and conserving wildlife. Governments must ensure its continued success by giving it the necessary financial backing," he said.
Today's launch also coincides with the World Day to Combat Desertification.
Mr Toepfer announced that a $100 million project to combat desertification in Africa had been agreed which involves UNEP and GEF.
The project, which is expected to be formally announced at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July will fight land degradation in order to deliver sustainable development in most if not all countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
웹사이트: http://www.unep.org.
연락처
Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson, Office of the Executive Director, on Tel: +254 20 62 3084; Mobile: +254 733 632 755, E-mail: 이메일 보내기
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2010년 6월 10일 10:36