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A healthy planet can fight
poverty
April 05, 2005, 16:00

By Ehsan Masood
Preserving healthy ecosystems is
essential for alleviating global poverty, according to reports
on the Science and Development Network website.

But
human activities such as agriculture and industrial
development are putting a potentially irreversible strain on
'ecosystem services' that are central to humanity's wellbeing,
the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says. It urges governments
to put a monetary value on ecosystem services, to help them
better understand the implications of ecosystem loss and
persuade them to invest in the measures needed to prevent this
decline.

The report says that the Millennium
Development Goals, a series of eight global targets to reduce
poverty and disease by 2015, will not be met unless, among
other measures, steps are taken to reverse ecosystem
decline.

"Any progress in addressing the Millennium
Development Goals is unlikely to be sustained if most of the
ecosystem services on which humanity relies continue to be
degraded," said Angela Cropper, co-chair of the assessment's
scientific panel and a former executive secretary of the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity.

Forests help
regulate climates
Forests, for instance, help regulate
climate by absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide,
prevent erosion by holding soil together and reduce the risk
of floods by controlling the flow of water into rivers. They
also provide products such as timber and medicinal
plants.

The report says that the decline in forest
cover, the expansion of agricultural land and the loss of
wildlife will have an adverse impact on food security and even
industrial development in the poorest countries. Food
supplies, for example, are likely to be reduced by
over-fishing and the loss of ecosystem services linked to
agriculture, such as pollination and pest control provided by
insects and other animals.

Eight of the world's largest
conservation groups signed a joint statement supporting the
assessment's findings.

The assessment's grim warnings
are "documenting how much we gain from nature every day," said
Achim Steiner, director general of the World Conservation
Union (IUCN), one of the signatories. "They are literally the
foundation for the livelihoods of millions of the
poorest."

According to Abdul Hamid Zakri, director of
the Institute of Advanced Studies at the United Nations
University in Japan, 30% of the scientists involved in the
assessment are from developing countries. Zakri, who
co-chaired the assessment's overall steering group, told
SciDev.Net that the worst ecological degradation was found in
some of the poorest developing countries – particularly in the
world's arid and semi-arid regions, which are home to some two
billion people.

Call to developing
countries
"I want to appeal to developing countries to
take a close interest in our findings and to act on them,"
said Zakri, who is Malaysia's former delegate to the UN
biodiversity convention.

More than 1 300 scientists
from 95 countries contributed to the report. In addition, some
800 experts commented on early drafts. The total cost of the
four-year exercise came to US$24 million.

Walter Reid,
director of the assessment, said that it had been undertaken
on a scale similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. But Jonathan Lash, president of the World
Resources Institute, a conservation policy think tank based in
the United States, admitted that unlike the climate change
panel, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment had not been
requested by governments in search of scientific
advice.

The idea for the assessment, he said,
originated nearly a decade ago among several large
conservation groups that felt that policymakers, particularly
in developing countries, were paying insufficient attention to
scientific assessments of the loss of biodiversity.

The
organisations convinced United Nations agencies that a major
review of the research was needed to convince policymakers
that conservation should not be ignored in the quest for
economic development. In order to gain the trust of developing
countries in the project, however, the assessment's founders
decided to involve a significant number of scientists,
conservation groups, the business community, representatives
of indigenous peoples and policymakers from developing
countries – in addition to senior executives from the
UN.

The report's conclusions are based on a review of
existing research (such as the Red List of Threatened
Species). They include the following:

Economic development has led to ecosystems being degraded
more rapidly and extensively during the past 50 years than at
any previous period in history.

Some 60% of ecosystem services examined in the assessment
are being degraded or used unsustainably.

More land has been converted to agriculture in the past 50
years than in the previous two centuries.

More than 50% of all nitrogen fertiliser use has taken
place in the past two decades.

The international
community needs to make environmental protection a top
priority if it wants to meet the Millennium Development
Goals.

The assessment's conclusions have been endorsed
by the World Bank, and several UN agencies and international
conservation groups, all of which helped to fund it. The
governments of China, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden were
also among the assessment's biggest donors. The document was
launched simultaneously at events in South Africa, Egypt,
France, Japan, Malaysia and the UK this week.

The
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report Ecosystems and Human
Well-being: A framework for assessment is the first in a
series of documents to be published throughout 2005. The
others will focus on specific aspects of the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment such as wetlands and biodiversity.

For more information, go online to the Science and
Development Network website at http://www.scidev.net/

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