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Health goment EssayTo address this challenge, the worlds governments committed themselves at the United Nations millennium tip to the Millennium Development Goals, including the overarching tendency of halving extreme penury by the year 2015. Yet, our planets capacity to deem us is eroding. The problems argon well(p)-known degrading agricultural lands, shrinking forests, diminishing supplies of clean water, dwindling fisheries, and the scourge of growing social and ecological vulnerability from climate compound and loss of biological diversity.While these threats ar global, their impacts atomic number 18 most severe in the maturation world especially among flock living in pauperism who have the least(prenominal) means to cope. Is this environmental dec decipher inevitable in order for distress to be inhibitd? We argue not. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. If we do not successfully arrest and regression these problems, the world will not be able to mee t the Millennium Development Goals, ill-temperedly the goal of halving extreme distress. As this paper demonstrates, tackling environmental abjection is an integral part of effective and lasting s raisetness reduction.The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) provides the world-wide community with a pivotal fortune to redirect the global debate, and to forge a more integrated and effective global response to poverty and environmental decline. To succeed, we need to focus on the most important links between poverty, the environment and sustainable nurture. For many, ensuring get going environmental charge means curtailment of stinting opportunities and exploitation, rather than their expansion too a good deal it is viewed as a cost rather than an investment.Prepared as a contribution to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development focuses on slipway to reduce poverty and sustain growth by improving solicitude of the environment, unspecificly defined. I t seeks to draw out the links between poverty and the environment, and to demonstrate that sound and fair environmental management is integral to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, in particular eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality, combating major diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.Four priority areas for sustained polity and institutional change are highlighted ?Improving governance for pro-poor and pro-environment policies, institutions and run, with particular attention to the needs of women and children ?Enhancing the assets of the poor and reducing their vulnerability to environment-related shocks and strife ?Improving the pure tone of growth to protect the asset base of the poor and expand opportunities for sustainable livelihoods ?Reforming inter guinea pig and industrialized country policies related to art, foreign direct investment, aid and debt.Policy opportunities exist to reduce poverty and improve the environme nt The environment matters greatly to people living in poverty. The poor often wager directly on inborn visions and ecological services for their livelihoods they are often the most affected by unclean water, indoor air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals and they are curiously vulnerable to environmental hazards such as floods and prolonged drought, and to environment-related engagement. Addressing these poverty-environment linkages must be at the core of national efforts to eradicate poverty. many an anformer(a)(prenominal)(prenominal) policy opportunities exist to reduce poverty by improving the environment but there are signifi posteriort and often deeply entrenched policy and institutional barriers to their widespread adoption. The past decade of acquire since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio reveals some important lessons that help point the way forward. Three broad lessons are highlighted here ?First and foremost, poor people must be seen as part of the ancestor ra ther than part of the problem.Efforts to improve environmental management in ways that contribute to sustainable growth and poverty reduction must begin with the poor themselves. Given the right incentives and support including access to training and participation in decision-making the poor will invest in environmental improvements to enhance their livelihoods and well- being. At the like time, however, it is essential to address the activities of the non-poor since they are the source of most environmental damage. The environmental spirit of growth matters to the poor. environmental improvement is not a luxury preoccupation that can wait until growth has alleviated income poverty, nor can it be assumed that growth itself will take care of environmental problems over the longer-term as a natural by-product of increasing affluence. First, this ignores the fundamental importance of environmental goods and services to the livelihoods and well-being of the rural and urban poor.Sec ond, there are many examples of how bad environmental management is bad for growth, and of how the poor bear a disproportionate share of the costs of environmental degradation. Ignoring the environmental soundness of growth even if this leads to short-run economic gains can undermine long-run growth and its effectiveness in reducing poverty. ?Environmental management cannot be treated separately from other victimization concerns, but requires integration into poverty reduction and sustainable development efforts in order to get through significant and lasting results.Improving environmental management in ways that benefit the poor requires policy and institutional changes that cut across sectors and lie mostly outside the defy of environmental institutions changes in governance, domestic economic policy, and in international policies. Improving governance ?Integrate poverty-environment issues into nationally-owned poverty reduction strategies, including macroeconomic and sect oral policy reforms and action programmes, so that they can go away national sustainable development strategies. Engage poor and marginalized groups in policy and planning processes to ensure that the rudimentary environmental issues that affect them are adequately addressed, to build ownership, and to enhance the prospects for achieving lasting results.Address the poverty-environment concerns of poor women and children and ensure that they are given higher priority and fully integrated into poverty reduction strategies and policy reforms for example, the growing pack of collecting scarce water and fuelwood supplies, and the effects of long-term exposure to polluted indoor air. Implement anti-corruption measures to forbid the role of corruption in the misuse of natural resources and weak enforcement of environmental regulations for example, the destructive impacts of il level-headed enter and unregulated mining, or the preference for construction of new power and water invest ments over increasing the cleverness of existing investments. ?Improve poverty-environment indicators to document environmental change and how it affects poor people, and integrate into national poverty monitor systems.This should be complemented by measures to improve citizens access to environmental information. Enhancing the assets of the poor ?Strengthen resource rights of the poor by reforming the wider range of policies and institutions that influence resource access, control and benefit-sharing, with particular attention to resource rights for women. This includes central and sub-national government, traditional authorities, the legal system, and local land boards, commissions and tribunals. Support decentralization and local environmental management land, water and forest resource management, and provision of water render and sanitation services by strengthening local management capacity and supporting womens key roles in managing natural resources. ?Expand access to env ironmentally-sound and pro-poor technology, such as harvest-home production technologies that conserve soil and water and minimize the use of pesticides, or permit renewable zippo and energy efficient technologies that also minimize air pollution.This includes support for indigenous technologies, and the need to address the social, cultural, financial and marketing aspects of technical change. ?Promote measures that reduce the environmental vulnerability of the poor by strengthening participatory disaster preparedness and prevention capacity, supporting the formal and informal act strategies of vulnerable groups, and expanding access to amends and other risk management mechanisms. Reduce the vulnerability of the poor to environment-related conflict by improving conflict resolution mechanisms in the management of natural resources and addressing the underlying policy-making issues that affect resource access. Improving the quality of growth ?Integrate poverty-environment issue s in economic policy and decision-making by strengthening the use of environmental mind and poverty social impact analysis. Improve environmental valuation at twain the macro and little level, in order to highlight the full cost of environmental degradation for the poor in particular and the economy in general, and to improve economic decision-making. ?Expand private sector involvement in pro-poor environmental management to maximize the efficiency gains from private sector participation, while safeguarding the interests of the poor.This requires capacity within government to hash out with the private sector for example, to ensure that utility privatization benefits the poor and to forge effective public-private partnerships that enhance the poors access to environmental services. ?Implement pro-poor environmental fiscal reform including reform of environmentally-damaging subsidies, improved use of snag taxes to give way capture and more effectively allocate resource revenue s, and improved use of pollution charges to better reflect environmental costs in market prices.Reforming international and industrialized country policies ?Reform trade and industrialized country subsidy policies to open up markets to create country imports while avoiding environmental protectionism, and to reduce subsidies that lead to unsustainable exploitation such as subsidies for large-scale commercial fishing fleets that encourage over-harvesting in developing country fisheries. . Make foreign direct investment more pro-poor and pro-environment by encouraging multinational corporations to observe with the revised OECD Code of Conduct for Multinational Enterprises, and to report on the environmental impact of their activities in line with the UN Environment Programmes Global Reporting Initiative. ?Increase funding for the Global Environment facility as the major source of funding for global public goods in the environment, such as a stable climate, maintenance of biodivers ity, clean international waters and the protective ozone layer.These benefit the whole world as well as the poor themselves so the rich world must pay a pleasure ground share for their maintenance. ?Enhance the contribution of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) to national development objectives by strengthening developing country capacity to participate in the negotiation and implementation of MEAs (for example, to ensure that the Clean Development tool promotes investments that benefit the poor).Also, improved coordination is needed between MEAs so that scarce developing country capacity is utilise most effectively. ?Encourage sustainable consumption and production industrialized country consumers and releasers through their trade, investment, pollution emissions and other activities affect the environmental conditions of developing countries. Making rich country consumption and production more sustainable will require a complex mix of institutional changes addres sing market and government failures as well as broad public attitudes. Enhance the effectiveness of development cooperation and debt relief with more priority for poverty-environment issues, specially for the poorest countries where aid and debt relief continue to have a valuable role to play in service governments to make many of the changes recommended above. Mainstream environment in donor agency operations through staff training, development and application of new skills, tools and approaches, and revisions to the way resources and budgets are allocated.Transparent monitoring of progress against stated objectives and targets is needed in order to hold development agencies accountable and to ensure that a commitment by senior management to addressing poverty-environment issues is put into practice throughout the organization. Conclusion This paper looks ahead with some degree of hope and optimism for the upcoming there are sometimes win-win opportunities, and there are ration al ways of dealing with trade-offs. Environmental degradation is not inevitable, nor the unavoidable result of economic growth.On the contrary, sound and equitable environmental management is key to sustained poverty reduction and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. There are significant policy opportunities to reduce poverty and improve the environment, but more integrated and pro-poor approaches are needed. The World Summit on Sustainable Development is an opportunity to focus on what is most important and to forge a uniform framework for action, with clear goals and achievable targets backed-up by adequate resources and effective and transparent monitoring mechanisms.There can be no more important goal than to reduce and ultimately eradicate poverty on our planet. PART 1 Why the Environment Matters to People Living in Poverty Water is aliveness and because we have no water, life is miserable (Kenya) We think the earth is generous but what is the incentive to produc e more than the family needs if there are no access roads to get produce to a market? (Guatemala) In the monsoons there is no difference between the land in front of our plate and the public drain. You can see for yourself (India) In their own words, the environment matters greatly to people living in poverty.Indeed, poor peoples perceptions of well-being are strongly related to the environment in damage of their livelihoods, health, vulnerability, and sense of empowerment and ability to control their lives. Figure 1 provides a simplified framework for perceptiveness how environmental management relates to poverty reduction, and why these poverty-environment linkages must be at the core of action to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and related national poverty eradication and sustainable development objectives.Environmental management for poverty reductionDimensions of povertyDevelopment goals Part 1 of the paper focuses on the poverty-environment relationship by examin ing how environmental conditions in twain rural and urban settings relate to three key dimensions of human poverty and well-being ?Livelihoods poor people tend to be most dependent upon the environment and the direct use of natural resources, and therefore are the most severely affected when the environment is degraded or their access to natural resources is limited or denied Health poor people suffer most when water, land and the air are polluted ? vulnerability the poor are most often exposed to environmental hazards and environment-related conflict, and are least capable of coping when they occur. We also are concerned with the relationship between growth and the environment and how it affects the poor and efforts to reduce poverty. The environmental soundness of growth matters considerably to the poor, and countries with similar levels of income and growth can have quite diametric levels of environmental performance.While Figure 1 illustrates the main pathways between envir onmental conditions and dimensions of poverty, in reality these linkages are multi-dimensional, energetic and often inter-connected ?Poverty is now widely viewed as encompassing both income and non-income dimensions of deprivation including lack of income and other material means lack of access to basic social services such as education, health and safe water lack of personal security and lack of empowerment to participate in the political process and in decisions that influence ones life.The dynamics of poverty also are better understood, and extreme vulnerability to external shocks is now seen as one of its major features. Environment refers to the biotic and abiotic components of the natural world that together support life on earth as a provider of goods (natural resources) and ecosystem services utilized for food production, energy and as raw material a recipient and partial recycler of abscond products from the economy and an important source of recreation, beauty, spiritu al values and other amenities. The nature and dynamics of poverty-environment linkages are context-specific reflecting both geographic location and economic, social and cultural characteristics of individuals, households and social groups. Different social groups can prioritize different environmental issues (Brocklesby and Hinshelwood, 2001). In rural areas, poor people are particularly concerned with their access to and the quality of natural resources, especially water, crop and grazing land, forest products and biomass for fuel. For the urban poor, water, energy, sanitation and waste removal are key concerns.Poor women regard safe and physically close access to potable water, sanitation facilities and voluminous energy supplies as crucial aspects of well-being, reflecting their primary role in managing the household. ?Environmental management, as used in this paper, extends well beyond the activities of public environmental institutions. In relation to poverty, environmental m anagement is concerned basically with sustaining the long-term capacity of the environment to provide the goods and services upon which people and economies depend.This means improving environmental conditions and ensuring equitable access to environmental assets in particular land and biological resources, and safe and affordable water supply and sanitation in order to expand poor peoples livelihood opportunities, protect their health and capacity to work, and reduce their vulnerability to environment-related risks. This broader conception of poverty and environment, and of environmental management, is essential to understanding the linkages between them and to identifying appropriate policy and institutional options for improving these linkages.There have been some impressive gains since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment the first global conference devoted to environment and development issues. There has been a proliferation of environmental policies and institutions at national and sub-national levels, and environmental issues are firmly placed on the agendas of governments, civil club and the private sector. Major global environmental agreements have been forged and global environmental organizations established.Environmental sustainability has become a core concern of bilateral and multilateral development cooperation, and billions of dollars have been spent on environment-related programmes and projects. plain progress also has been achieved on the ground, although the picture is usually mixed. For example, in the 1990s some 900 trillion people gained access to improved water sources. However, this was merely enough to keep pace with population growth, and more or less 1. 2 billion people are still without access to improved water sources, with rural populations particularly under-served (Devarajan et al, 2002).Another example is the productivity of soil used for cereal production, which increased on average in developin g countries from 1979-81 to 1998-2000. However, it fell in some 25 countries, most of them in Africa, with land degradation being one factor behind the decline (World Bank, 2002c). Despite these gains, pressure on the environment continues to mount worldwide, present major challenges to the prospects for poverty reduction and human development in developing countries, in particular the least developed countries.