| Sustainable Development Update Issue 5, Volume 3, 2003 The Sustainable Development Update (SDU) focuses on the links between ecology, society and the economy. It is produced by Albaeco, an independent non-profit organisation. SDU is produced with support from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Environment Policy Division. Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor If you want to download the newsletter as PDF click here 
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| Editorial | ||
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Growth and development are not synonymous Economic growth in developing countries is essential to achieve The Millennium Development Goal to halve global poverty by 2015. Billions of poor want to attain a decent quality of life and the most basic of human rights. But does it matter if this growth comes at the expense of the environment? Many say “no” when the question is posed this way. It seems to be about nature or humans – as though the two were fundamentally different and in confl ict. And of course most people think of their own species first. It’s natural. The idea that poor countries must first get suf- ficiently rich before they can afford to care about the environment is widespread. This thinking stems to a large part from the theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curves. According to this theory environmental damage increases up to a certain level of GDP per capita, and then begins to decrease when society has become “rich enough”. Pollution in drinking water and sulphur emissions are examples that has shown a tendency to decrease as per capita income increases. However, emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and waste generation show continued worsening as incomes rise. So, this means we might strain at important gnats but swallow camels and miss seeing the big picture. It is much easier, and cheaper, to pollute than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Ecosystems do seldom respond linearly and increasing pollution might cause unexpected collapse of important functions when thresholds are reached. Moreover, many types of environmental degradation are essentially irreversible, meaning that they persist also after the environmental pressure has been removed. Hence, we tend to underestimate the true costs of environmental degradation – our ways of calculating growth do not include these costs. There are numerous examples of countries where GDP per capita grows at the expense of the environment. However, an increasing number of people are challenging the idea that economic growth measured as GNP is the ultimate solution to the problems of poverty and environmental degradation. Growth and development are not synonymous. Protecting nature’s structure, functions, and diversity is not merely a concern for environmentalists. Our species depends on these features of natural systems. Without them development will undermine itself and fail. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed it neatly ahead of last year’s World Summit: “The issue is not environment versus development, or ecology versus economy. Contrary to popular belief, we can integrate the two. Nor is the issue one of rich versus poor. Both have a clear interest in protecting the environment and promoting sustainable development.” /Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor | ||
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Protected areas and benefits beyond boundaries – The new approach to protected areas focuses more on protecting nature for than from humans. Conserving biodiversity is not just a matter of protecting wildlife from humans in nature reserves. The new approach to protected areas focuses more on protecting nature for than from humans. Protected areas improve the quality of our air, soil, and water, generate food and medicine, and provide genetic richness for improvement of our crops and livestock. They can provide numerous benefits beyond park boundaries and contribute to the alleviation of poverty. But conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity outside protected areas must not be forgotten.  Protected areas often fail when they exclude local people, like these Masai People in The Masai Mara National Park in Kenya. Photo: Jonny Larsson. ”Benefits Beyond Boundaries” was the theme of the recent 5th IUCN World Parks Congress (WPC) gathering 3000 delegates in Durban, South Africa. The WPC is a ten-yearly event and the major global forum for protected areas (PA). This year’s congress manifested an overall trend within the conservation community: an increased focus on the relevance of protected areas to the broader economic, social and environmental agenda. As such it also refl ects a growing understanding of the importance of ecosystems and their biodiversity for human development and poverty alleviation. During the WPC The 2003 United Nations List of Protected Areas was released. It shows that the number of protected areas in the world has grown considerably during the 20th century, especially in the last quarter of the century. In 1962 when the first UN List was published there were just over 1,000 protected areas. Today there are more than 102,000 sites, corresponding to 11.5% of the Earth’s land surface – an area bigger than India and China combined. Marine protected areas, on the other hand only cover about 0.5% of the world’s oceans. Almost each country has its own types of and nomenclature for protected areas. However, six different general categories of parks have been identified on the international level (see box 1).
Protected areas and poverty alleviation Many protected areas in the world have been established in developing countries to protect fragile ecosystems, outstanding scenery or wildlife. Unfortunately, the conventional approach to protected areas has tended to exclude or restrict local people from the resources on which they rely, without providing alternative livelihoods. This has often led to confl icts in developing countries where protected areas have tended to be of low priority. Many protected areas in developing countries have even been called “Paper parks” as they lack technical and financial resources to achieve their objectives. However, more recently this is beginning to change. A growing number of people have realised that protected areas can provide numerous benefits for human development and contribute to the alleviation of poverty (box 2). Participants at one of the workshops ”Building Broader Support for Protected Areas” at the 5th WPC concluded that the biggest challenge for protected areas in the 21st century is how to ensure that they receive the public support that they require to prosper. The workshop resulted in a number of recommendations on poverty and protected areas, including the following guiding principles:
Economic benefits of protected areas Conserving biodiversity is much more than protecting endangered species in protected areas. Protected areas, and conservation in general, are today increasingly focusing on safeguarding functions in natural systems, their ecosystem services. Ecosystems purify water, cycle oxygen and carbon, maintain soil fertility, yield food and medicine, and provide the genetic richness we use to improve our crops and livestock. From this point of view, nature reserves are excellent investments. According to a study published in the distinguished scientific magazine Nature last year natural habitats are worth far more if left intact than if they are exploited. The report estimated that a global network of nature reserves would cost about USD 45 billion a year, and would ensure the delivery of ecosystem goods and services with an annual value of USD 4,400 billion to USD 5,200 billion. Hence, it pays around 100 to 1 to preserve these habitats instead of converting them to typical forms of human use. Today, the world spends only USD 6.5 billion each year on the existing reserve network. The value of ecosystem goods and services often outweighs the cost of their preservation. Sometimes the link between a PA and economic benefits is obvious. In Costa Rica protected areas generate over $300 million from tourism every year. Besides this economic payback protected areas also contribute to increased concern for nature conservation in general. However, unplanned tourism can lead to degradation of ecosystems, disruption of social systems and increased poverty. Another example is when a third of St Lucia’s fishing grounds were protected from fishing in 1995. Within three years commercially important stocks doubled in the nearby waters, generating valuable export incomes and an important protein source. Similar experiences come from Philippines and the Apo Island marine reserve. It was originally established in 1982 and protected about 10% of the island’s total reef area. After ten years numbers of commercially and ecologically important reef fish increased roughly 8 times inside the reserve, and after 20 years line-fishing catches had increased ten times. Paradoxically, restricting fishing in some places can lead to larger overall catches. This is because fish live longer and grow larger in areas protected from fishing. The larger the fish inside reserves grow the more offspring they produce. These offspring are transported from reserves on ocean currents to re-supply fishing grounds. A number of the big fish also move about giving fishermen a nice catch outside the reserves. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol is another example that can help make protected areas profitable and contribute to poverty alleviation. The CDM allows investors from developed countries with high emissions to purchase a ”carbon credit” from developing countries, which, in return, reduce their emissions or increase carbon sinks by for example conserving forests or investing in clean technologies. Such payment for carbon benefits can increase the value of forests relative to other land uses.  Protecting for or from humans? Protected areas in developing countries are much more succesful if local people are engaged and can benefit from the protected areas. Reserves necessary but not sufficient In a recent publication in Ambio, the Scientific Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a group of Swedish scientists warns that there is a tendency that protected areas are seen as sufficient for biodiversity conservation: that the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity outside protected areas is forgotten. With this mental model ecosystems are divided into those that should be protected from humans and those that can be used or fully exploited. Far too often we end up with small areas of reserves as islands in intensively used landscapes. Such small and isolated reserves are generally more vulnerable to disturbances and damages. Forests, for example, can suffer from fire or storm damage. Whether or not the forest will become functioning again after such a disturbance depends on both the remaining diversity of plants and animals within the damaged forest, and on its proximity to a healthy forest (e.g. the distance to another reserve) that can export seeds and organisms to the damaged area. In this context, reserves preserve biodiversity as insurance for other reserves and the rest of the landscape. But if they become too small and scattered each reserve becomes more vulnerable. The scientists argue that humans should be viewed as a part of and not apart from nature and that conservation of biodiversity and preservation of ecosystem services must be a concern for all land use. Another problem identified by the group of Swedish scientists is that most reserves have been established to remain essentially the same and in the same place for centuries. Nature, on the other hand, is much more dynamic. It has become more and more obvious to both scientists and practitioners that the only constant in nature is change itself. A reserve that has worked well for a hundred years can all of a sudden be devastated by a huge storm of the kind that occurs once a century. In the long term, it will be difficult to exclude such large and rare disturbances. To be really useful, reserves should not be isolated and static, but be designed as networks and regarded as parts of the rest of the landscapes. The long-term goal should be to create less vulnerable landscapes, with sufficient biodiversity, that can continue to generate ecosystem goods and services and cope with disturbances also in the future. /Fredrik Moberg More at: http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/wpc2003/ http://www.safrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/ sustainable/parks-poverty.htm http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/pubs/pdfs/ biodiversity/biodiv_brf_15.pdf http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/142/content.html Source: Bengtsson, J and others. ”Reserves, Resilience and Dynamic Landscapes”, Ambio (The Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), Vol. 32 No. 6, Sept. 2003 | ||
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Anthropocene is a newly proposed term for the present geological epoch in order to illustrate the growing impacts of human activities on Earth and atmosphere during the last centuries. Anthropocene would take over from Holocene (“Recent Whole”), which has been the term for the postglacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years. The new term has been proposed by the two scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stroemer. Examples of the worldwide infl uence of mankind on the Earth System include urbanisation that has increased tenfold in the past century, that humanity has transformed 30-50% of the land surface, and that in a few generations mankind is using up the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years ago – before the time of the dinosaurs. The level of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere has increased by more than 30% and 100% respectively. “Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe million years to come”, says Crutzen and Stroemer. They propose the latter part of the 18th century as the starting date of the Anthropocene. “We chose this date because during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable”, they say. /Line Gordon More at: Crutzen, PJ, and Stoermer, EF 2000. “The Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17-18. (http://www.igbp.kva.se//uploads/nl_41.pdf) | ||
| In Brief | ||
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The first report from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
MA is the most extensive study ever of the linkages between the world’s ecosystems and human well-being. It was launched by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and combines the skills of leading natural and social scientists from over 100 nations. The goal of MA is to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the contribution of ecosystems to human well-being without undermining their long-term productivity. The new release is mainly a technical report describing the approaches, and methods scientists are using in the study. The research results of MA will be published starting late 2004 in a series of four in-depth reports and up to seven shorter studies intended for decision-makers in government, the private sector, and civil society groups. Ecosystems and poverty The MA-project also focuses on improving ecosystem management for contributing to poverty alleviation. In a section of the new report dealing with the links between ecosystems and poverty reduction it is concluded that both human well-being and poverty is multidimensional. It is about much more than money, and includes basic material for a good life, freedom and choice, health, good social relations, and security. Most of these aspects can be linked to ecosystem health. Hence, escalating human impacts on ecosystems affect human well-being in many ways. This includes impacts on the supplies of food and other goods and the likelihood of confl ict over declining resources, and other ecosystem changes that could infl uence the frequency and magnitude of fl oods, droughts, landslides, or other catastrophes. Another issue that is addressed is the link between ecosystem health and human health. Moreover, the loss of important ceremonial or spiritual attributes of ecosystems can contribute to the weakening of social relations in a community. /Fredrik Moberg More at: The report can be downloaded at: http://pubs.wri.org/pubs_pdf.cfm?PubID=3927 "Protected forests provide clean drinking water to more than a third of the world’s biggest cities" Partly or fully protected forests provide clean drinking water to more than a third of the world’s 105 biggest cities, including New York, Tokyo, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi. According to a recent report, adopting a forest protection strategy can result in massive savings and is, for example, much cheaper than building water treatment plants. 2003 has been proclaimed the International Year of Freshwater by the United Nations in order to provide a platform for promoting existing activities and spearheading new initiatives in water resources management. As part of the freshwater year UN has identified clean freshwater for an increasingly urbanised world population as one of the most pressing issues in the new millennium. An intriguing insight from a recent report by the “World Bank /World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use” is that the solutions for acquiring this water resides not only in technology, but also on the protection of forests. Well-managed natural forests substantially improve water quality by filtering pollutants, such as pesticides, and minimise the risk of landslides, erosion and sedimentation. The need for costly chemical treatment reduced One of the examples in the report is Rio de Janeiro, the third largest urban concentration in Latin America with a population of approximately 6 million. Historically, the city has had a good record of protecting forests that provide clean water to its population. However, as chemical water treatments became available the importance of forests in protecting water quality showed a tendency to be forgotten. Nonetheless, where forests have been protected water quality has remained high and the need for costly chemical water treatment much reduced. The report illustrates that in several cases watershed protection has been a major reason for establishing protected areas. Watershed protection has thus sometimes bought critical time for biodiversity, by protecting forests that would otherwise have disappeared in the urbanisation process. The possibilities to collect user fees from people and companies benefiting from drinking water to help pay for the forest protection in watersheds is also addressed. Payment for water services can be one important way of helping negotiations with people living in or using watersheds to develop land-use mosaics that maintain high quality drinking water supplies. /Line Gordon More at: The full report can be downloaded at: http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/envext.nsf/ 80ByDocName/ProtectedAreasProtectedAreas ManagementRunningPure Emerging markets for forest ecosystem services One of the many interesting topics discussed at the seminar entitled ”FSC and Beyond: Forest Certification and New Markets” in Stockholm on October 10th dealt with finding market based solutions for the conservation of forests.  Forests are often worth more standing than as lumber. Photo: Jakob Lundberg Despite their great value to society, most services provided by forest ecosystems have until recently been treated as ”commons” without financial worth. However, there is a spiralling awareness of the many services that forests provide, such as climate stabilization, storm protection, watershed protection, biodiversity conservation and carbon storage. Assigning a value to environmental services provided by forests makes them more attractive than alternative land uses after forest clearing and motivates re-creation of forests. Dr. David Brand, Director of the New Forests Program at Hancock Natural Resource Group in Sydney, described forests as ”natural infrastructure” because they are needed to maintain water, wildlife and climatic stability in the same way that roads and schools are needed. In New South Wales, Australia, there is already a market for these ecosystem services, particularly for carbon sequestration and ”dryland salinity trading”. Dryland salinity is caused by the removal of native vegetation from upper areas of water catchments, allowing higher volumes of rainwater to soak into the watertable. As a result, watertables in the lower parts of the catchment rise and bring naturally occurring salt to the surface. To mitigate this an irrigation district paid the Australian forestry agency to plant trees in the uplands to help preserve the soil’s integrity in the valley. The deal created a set of ”salinity credits” that the farmers could buy and sell to downstream users. The landholders were paid an annual gratuity, in addition to providing other multiple economic benefits in carbon storage and wood pulp production from sustainable forestry. Bettina von Hagen, Vice President of EcoTrust talked about ”habitat banking”. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) requires developers to invest a lot of money in mitigating the impact of their development. Say the developer finds that his development is going to impact on salmon habitat. Through the use of ”salmon banking” the developer can buy credits from the ”bank”, which in this case might be a nonprofi t group that has acquired salmon habitat somewhere that it is actively restoring. Instead of improving habitat for salmon in places where there might not even be any salmon, larger areas can be restored where they actually exist. Examples from developing countries There are also many promising investments and programs in developing countries. For example, in Belize, a carbon sequestration project has saved more than 5000 ha of forests adjacent to Rio Bravo from being converted into farmland. More than 1.6 million tons of carbon will be sequestered at a cost of $3 per ton. Rio Bravo has one of Belize’s best stocked areas of mahogany, cedar and other commercially valuable trees as well as one of the largest populations of jaguar in Central America. Through this, Belize has gained watershed protection and biodiversity preservation. Community development gains are expected to occur from eco-tourism and sustainable logging of certified timber from a portion of the land. In Karnataka State, India, farmers have formed a fund with the assistance of India and the Swiss Development Cooperation to help local farmers with watershed protection services, such as regenerating and maintaining fallow land. In Colombia, hydroelectric and water utilities are required by law to allocate a fixed percentage of revenues to an ecosystem fund. The fund pays private landowners for watershed management and purchases hydrologically sensitive lands. /Caroline von Post Carlsson More at: http://www.htrg.com http://www.forest-trends.org http://www.eldis.org/forests From public pipes to private hands in Dar es Salaam Do you buy canned water? Then you'repart of a global trend, visualising the commercialisation of water. In the western countries it’s a craze to quench one’s thirst with fancy bottles of ”pure water”. But in many developing countries, with limited and unorganised water supply, people have to buy canned water to get any. Marianne Kjellén has, during her doctoral studies at the department of human geography at Stockholm University, studied the water provision system in Dar es Salaam. One of the major health risks in the world concerns water quality, sanitation and hygiene. Water stress is often caused by unorganised handling and distribution of water, rather than low amounts of rain and high evaporation rates, according to recent studies. Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, suffers from problems caused by a fast and unorganised urban sprawl, resulting in a lack of reliable water supply, sanitation, drainage, security and other municipal services. This threatens public safety and health. The regional water supply system allocates water from the Ruvu River into the city, but it is not developed into local branches. Consequently, people build individual supply systems depending on their economic abilities, e.g. connecting own pipes to the regional system, buying shares of the neighbor’s supply system or storage, or buying water from vendors. This informal water supply system has been studied by Marianne Kjellén at Stockholm University. More than 50 percent of the households in Dar es Salaam buy water from vendors, indicating that the informal water market is well developed. Water has become a commodity and a common good is being individualised and it results in inequalities. The most common diseases in Dar es Salaam are malaria and diarrheas, likely due to the water situation, where the poorest suffer the most from water stress because they are unable to buy water. Local effects and global trends Commercialisation and privatisation are global trends together with the change of the role of the society, from being provisionary to become regulatory. M. Kjellén has investigated these processes that are driven by powerful western companies and international organisations having huge impacts on the local water supply system. Big companies own and improve the water system, but also formalise the water market, excluding poor people. Meanwhile, the excluded, experience a worsened health situation. Who is responsible for these poor people, living in severe water stress surrounded by a functioning water supply system? M. Kjellén suggests that one solution may be a structured collaboration where the different supply systems are integrated and supervised by the authorities. /Sara Borgström Brazilian environmentalist and Chinese minister share U.N. Environment prize One of them has shown that China’s dramatic economic growth does not have to threaten the environment and the other that illegal wildlife trade can only be curbed if poverty is also tackled. For this they share one of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards. Xie Zhenhua from China and Dener Jose Giovanini from Brazil share this year’s UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize. The two prize winners have both, one at the governmental and the other at the grass-roots level, “shown vision, patience, pragmatism and an understanding of the need to engage and encourage numerous actors and partners if sustainable development is to be realized,” according to UNEP. Xie Zhenhua, minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration of China (SEPA), has done his best to steer the world’s fastest growing economy on an environmentally sustainable path and demonstrate that economic growth can occur without sacrificing the environment. Together with local government and economic departments Xie has helped phase out polluting and outdated processes, products and equipment in more than 100,000 small and medium sized companies. He has also promoted the expansion of protected areas and reserves in China that now has over 1,700 nature reserves covering about 13 percent of the country. The other prize winner, Dener Jose Giovanini of Brazil, started the National Network for Combating Wild Animal Trafficking (RENCTAS). This innovative network concentrates on the cause and effect of the illegal trade by gathering public support and offering alternative livelihoods for potential poachers. The methodology, that has become a model also for many other countries in the developing world, highlights that creative solutions to illegal trades can only succeed if poverty is also tackled. More at: http://www.unep.org Volvo Environment Prize 2003 for research on biodiversity, local knowledge and poverty Indian Professor Madhav Gadgil has linked science and conservation to the needs and knowledge of poor local communities. His work shows that local knowledge can be of central importance to scientific research and land use planning. Indian Professor Madhav Gadgil, one of the world’s leading ecologists, is awarded The 2003 Volvo Environment Prize for his pathbreaking work in integrating research on biodiversity with the needs of people and their communities. The need for an interdisciplinary approach to environmental problems and sustainable development is becoming increasingly obvious, but most scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems. Professor Gadgil is an exception. He has gone beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to investigate the links between poverty, development and the environment. According to the jury ”his work is a model for how science can help bring people and Nature together for win-win solutions”. His research emphasises the role of traditional knowledge of local communities for scientific research and management of ecosystems and natural resources. Professor Gadgil was also the main contributor to the establishment of India’s first biosphere reserve in the Western Ghats. Gadgil shares the prize with Dr. Mohammad Yunus from Bangladesh. He founded the unconventional ”Grameen Bank” in 1983, which provides small loans to poor rural people, especially women. These loans have had profound impacts on social capital and women’s empowerment, which in turn is strongly associated with conservation and sustainable natural resource management. After the prize ceremony, on October 29, in Brussels, Belgium, Professor Gadgil visited Sweden to discuss the future of nature conservation together with a number of Swedish key actors. More at: http://www.environment-prize.com “Development is not a rose garden!” “Forget about the Millennium Development Goals being fulfilled by 2015 – it will take much longer!” This is what Professor Christer Gunnarsson, Lund University, told the participants at the Annual Conference on Development, “Growth for All”, organised by Sida, UNDP and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, also environmental considerations tended to be forgotten at the conference, in spite of its importance for poverty alleviation and human development. The many and distinguished speakers brought up what factors they believed would increase growth in order to halve extreme poverty. To Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP’s Administrator, democracy is the key. At the same time, he said that a huge amount of capital is needed, thus the private sector must become involved. Videolinked Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz established that the benefits of growth must be shared. Professor Gunnarsson continued by stating that structural change – socially, economically and politically – is the most important factor. “ Development is not a rose garden, the road there is not smooth! Structural change is not good for everyone, but in the long run it is good.” The concept of environmentally sustainable development was only briefl y touched upon at this conference – perhaps the organisers felt that this issue had been taken care of at last year’s conference where the theme was health and its link to the economy and the environment. Many believe that consideration of the environment is a luxury and can only be enjoyed once livelihoods for the poor have been provided. Mary Muduuli, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury of Uganda, commented on the realism of environmentally sustainable growth at all times: ”This is what we would wish for, but it will probably not happen”. Linely Chiwona Karltun, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences agreed: “ The environment takes second stage because the poverty issue is more acute now”. At the same time, one of the many interactive surveys showed that a majority of the conference delegates thought that unsustainable growth was unacceptable. Sustainable growth However, many positive examples of sustainable growth were described in an advertising supplement distributed through all the major daily Swedish newspapers a few days prior to the conference. In this supplement from Sida it was concluded that growth must come about through environmental awareness, without depleting natural resources. For example, in Zambia’s Eastern Province, energy is provided by suncells thereby increasing productivity because it allows production to continue even after sunset, and stores and restaurants can stay open longer. Solar cells also power telephone booths in Uganda. In Tanzania, certifying agricultural production as ecological through EPOPA (Export Promotion of Organic Products from Africa) has increased farmers’ income by 25-50 percent. In Altiplanon, Bolivia, Swedish development aid has allowed the familyrun ice cream business Delizia to invest in environmentally friendly production methods, thereby increasing its competitiveness. This company has grown to become the second largest icecream, yoghurt and juice producer in the country and has allowed thousands of poor farmers to transfer from coca to other products that can be sold to Delizia. The number of poor people in the world has never increased as rapidly as in recent decades, nor has the depletion of natural resources on which we all depend. At the same time, poor people are to a greater extent than others directly dependent on renewable resources. Also, poor countries usually lack the resources needed to take proper care of susbstances that put pressure on the environment. Thus measures taken to combat poverty must go hand in hand with environmental caretaking as well. More at: http://www.sida.se The quote: “We are all part of a giant ecological system, the knowledge of which we have only a most basic grasp. The system does not play favourites. It does not care which species thrive and which species fail. To it, 10,000 years of human civilization is a mere pittance in the planet’s 4.5 billion year history. If we squander our opportunity to achieve something truly great as a species, it will be no one’s fault but our own. And Mother Nature will simply shrug her shoulders, roll up her sleeves, and start again.” David Suzuki, October 29, 2003: http://www.enn.com/news/10-29-2003/s_9865.asp |
