Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty

www.wri.org

August 31, 2005 -- A report that challenges conventional approaches is released today at a critical moment in the battle against poverty. The report, World Resources 2005: The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty, stresses the urgent need to look beyond aid projects, debt relief and trade reform and focus on local natural resources to address the crisis of poverty in all parts of the globe.

"Traditional assumptions about addressing poverty treat the environment almost as an afterthought," said Jonathan Lash, president, World Resources Institute (WRI). "This report addresses the stark reality of the poor: three-fourths of them live in rural areas; their environment is all they can depend on. Environmental resources are absolutely essential, rather than incidental, if we are to have any hope of meeting our goals of poverty reduction."

The report finds that environmental organizations have not addressed poverty and development groups have not considered the environment enough in the past. The model presented in the report details how natural resources -- soils, forests, water, fisheries - managed at the local level are frequently the most effective means for the world's rural poor people to create wealth for themselves.

Dozens of case studies detailed within World Resources 2005 demonstrate how local stewardship of nature can be a powerful means of fighting poverty. Control over restoring 700,000 local acres of denuded forests and grazing lands was given by the Tanzanian government to the Sukuma people and they now have higher household incomes, better diets, as well as increased populations of  tree, bird and mammal species. Ucunivanua villagers in Fiji were given control by the government of clam beds and coastal waters, and because of local restrictions placed on fishing, mangrove lobster and harvestable clam populations have increased dramatically. In India, community control over the watershed has led to a nearly six-fold increase in the cash value of crops grown in Darewadi Village.

"There are encouraging examples of ecosystems being managed for the long-term to create wealth for poor communities, but there is still a huge job to do," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "Natural resources can be properly used to greatly reduce poverty. The time has come to reverse the course of worsening diseases, depleted natural resources, political instability, inequality, and the social corrosion of angry generations that have no means to rise out of poverty."

While globalization has resulted in greater wealth for many people in urban areas throughout the developing world - such as parts of China and India - these gains have often bypassed rural areas, except in the rare exceptions detailed in the report. Nearly half of the world's six-billion people live on less than $2 per day. Three-quarters of those poor people live in rural areas. These rural households depend overwhelmingly on natural resources for their income. If these ecosystems become degraded, as many have over the past 50 years, they will never provide the fuel for economic development that will boost the rural poor beyond subsistence and into the mainstream of national economies.

"We need to stop thinking of the environment as a passive element. It is a fundamental part of community-based decision making," said Ian Johnson, vice president of sustainable development, The World Bank. "Unfortunately, the poor often lack legal rights to ecosystems and are excluded from decisions about ecosystem management. Without addressing these failures through changes in governance, there is little chance of using the economic potential of ecosystems to reduce rural poverty."

The moment is critical in the battle against poverty because of converging current events. At the G-8 Summit in July, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other world leaders focused almost exclusively on the problems of global poverty. Prior to the G-8, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment -- a report by an international panel of 1,300 scientists - found how humans have modified and degraded the world's ecosystems in the past 50 years. In mid-September, heads of state at the UN Summit are expected to further review progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

"Community stewardship of local resources should be a critical element of any poverty-reduction model," said Olav Kjørven, director, Energy and Environment Group, Bureau for Development Policy, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). "With greater income from the environment -- call it 'environmental income' -- poor families experience better nutrition and health, and begin to accumulate wealth. In other words, they begin the journey out of poverty."

World Resources 2005: The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty is the 11th in a series of biennial reports on global environment and governance issues published since 1984. This particular report's focus on poverty issues follows upon conclusions from the previous two reports -- the first was about ecosystems and the second was about governance. Since 1996, the series has been published jointly by The World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the World Resources Institute.

See the Flash slide shows presenting case studies -- on India, Fiji, and Namibia -- from the World Resources 2005, with an introduction by WRI president Jonathan Lash.

Forests Worth Far More Alive Than Dead

INTER PRESS SERVICE, 09/29/06; source: www.ran.org
September 29, 2006
By Stephen Leahy

... The U.S. could offset nearly 20 percent of its current emissions of CO2 by turning marginal farmland into forests.  An estimated 115 million acres of land in the lower United States that is poor for agriculture but good for growing trees could store enough carbon to reduce the country's current emissions of 7.075 billion metric tonnes by nearly 20 percent, according to the report "Agricultural and Forestlands: U.S. Carbon Policy Strategies" released recently by the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.  "There is lots of land out there and we are tapping so very little of our ability to sequester carbon," says report co-author Ken Richards of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.  "It would cost about 50 dollars per metric tonne of carbon stored," Richards told IPS.  Most of the 50 dollars per tonne of carbon cost is compensation for landowners."  Farmers support the idea but only if they can count on receiving money for this over the long term....

Pensions For Peace
Millions of Canadians are forced to invest contributions to their Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in war, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation. Canadians want socially responsible pension investments. Download our CPP Portfolio Report to learn more.

Is God Green?

From Bill Moyers and PBS

From CBC's THE HOUR:

Can we grow our wings in time?

by Ron Williams

The way author David Korten sees it, the human species will soon be in the organic soup. And time is running out for us to grow our wings.

In Korten’s new book, The Great Turning (Berrett-Koehler/Kumarian Press, $27.95), evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris tells the story of the extraordinary yet commonplace metamorphosis of the monarch caterpillar to the monarch butterfly, offering it as a powerful metaphor for what the human species now faces.

“The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

“Yet, guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, multicellular structures that give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillar’s immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

“The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a co-operative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on the Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine.”

In his ambitious and intricately interwoven call to action, Korten mixes up a potent blend of ecological, economic, social, and cultural analysis. The title comes from eco-philosopher Joanna Macy’s statement that has reverberated across the planet: “Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning.” Or, warns Korten, if we don’t make good choices, “The Great Unraveling.”

Korten, who is hardly alone in this regard, believes the human species will soon face a perfect economic and environmental storm that will change every aspect of modern life.

He maintains that peak oil, together with global warming and the coming collapse of the U.S. dollar, will converge in such a way as to call the question on social and economic organization as we know it.

In Turning, he contrasts what he calls Empire (the hierarchical ordering of human relationships based on the principle of domination) and Earth Community (the egalitarian democratic ordering of relationships based on the principle of partnership). Based on Riane Eisler’s seminal work, he describes 5,000 years of conflict between the two. While the dominator models have ruled for most of that time in various incarnations from feudal lords to nation states to corporations, he suggests that people and the planet have reached their limit of exploitation.

Newtonian physics, argues Korten, was based on the premise that only the material is real. Quantum physics suggests that the material is an illusion and only relationships are real. The new biology teaches us that, by the very nature of how life manages energy, life can only exist in co-operative community. And psychologists tell us that healthy, caring relationships are the key to achieving a mature human consciousness. His conclusion? A sustainable future must be self-organizing, local, and built on relationships.

He sees a move from global back to local and from suburban sprawl to compact communities with local supply chains that are substantially self-reliant for food and energy. He challenges us to turn away from the domination of each other and the natural world and welcome a new era in which security and prosperity come through community, not through money and military force.

At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time.

Half the world population now lives in cities, which are growing by over one million inhabitants each week. The 92 million added in 1991 is equivalent to adding in one year the population of about six New York Cities. There are now 91 cities with one million or more inhabitants, and 23 megacities with populations of more than ten million. There can be no sustainability without sustainable cities.

This Urban Management software application enables any town or city to see itself - and its surrounding environment - as a whole system, measure its ecological footprint, and plan its transition to sustainability.

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT

The ecological footprint concept is a historical breakthrough - like the discovery that the Earth is round - worthy of a Nobel Prize. Developed by Global Vision advisory board member Professor William E. Rees at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Mathis Wackernagel who founded the Global Footprint Network (www.footprintnetwork.org) in Oakland, California (see interview), the concept bridges economics and ecology by quantifiying humanity's use of natural resources.

Detailed analysis reveals that humanity's footprint grew by 250% from 1961 to 2001, to a level 21% higher than the Earth's carrying capacity. Most developed economies are running massive ecological deficits, and humankind is rapidly liquidating our planet's natural capital to support current resource use, thereby violating the right of future generations to meet their own needs. The Global Footprint Network has published ecological footprint analyses for 150 countries, which should be required reading for governments, corporations and NGOs seeking policies and tools to encourage accurate market prices, protect our common assets, and foster social and economic sustainability. If every nation consumed resources as inefficiently as the USA, we would need 3 planets to survive! Ecological footprint analysis now makes sustainability an accountable goal, and renders sustainability talk meaningless unless it is backed up by specific measurable commitments and timetables for implementation.

At a European Parliament event in June 2005, EU President Barroso helped launch Global Footprint Network and WWF's Report Europe 2005: The Ecological Footprint. The report shows that the EU uses 20 per cent of what the world's ecosystems provide in terms of fibres, food, energy, and waste absorption. Yet Europe is home to only 7 per cent of the world population. Europe's demand on the planet has risen by almost 70 per cent since 1961. Europeans now require 4.9 globally average hectares per person to provide for their lifestyle. As the continent can only supply 2.2 global hectares per person, Europeans rely on the rest of the world to make up this increasing deficit. Europe's Ecological Footprint represents an area more than twice the size of its geographical area.