Goal #7Environmental Sustainability
Introduction
Reducing poverty and achieving sustained development must be done in conjunction with a healthy planet. The Millennium Goals recognize that environmental sustainability is part of global economic and social well-being. Unfortunately exploitation of natural resources such as forests, land, water, and fisheries-often by the powerful few-have caused alarming changes in our natural world in recent decades, often harming the most vulnerable people in the world who depend on natural resources for their livelihood.
The Targets
Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goals sets out by the year 2015 to:
- Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
- Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss.
- Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
- By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Did You Know?
In our world today around 2.5 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation and some 1.2 billion people do not have access to an improved source of water. (Source:Why do the Millennium Development Goals matter? Brochure)
Achieving the Goals
In 2007 Madagascar’s government established 15 new conservation areas covering over 2.65 million acres of wildlife. The new parks will protect several threatened ecosystems including wetlands and rain forests.
Goal News
SAN SALVADOR, Sep 11 (IPS) – After several years’ delay, authorities in El Salvador are about to permanently close down the unofficial open-air rubbish dumps that have polluted the country for decades.
But experts and activists are not satisfied with the decision, saying it deals only with the final disposal of waste, while neglecting environmental education and awareness-raising on the recycling and classifying of garbage.
STOCKHOLM, Aug 16 (IPS) – There are more than 2.6 billion people, roughly 42 percent of the world’s population, waiting in line for toilets that just do not exist.
That’s a reality, says the United Nations, which will launch the “International Year of Sanitation”, come November.
“No private toilets, no public toilets, no toilets anywhere,” chimes in the London-based non-governmental organisation End Water Poverty, following a survey of some of the world’s poorest nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
