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Millennium Development Goals Panel Discussion:
Improving Living Conditions
Task Force Coordinator Roberto Lenton, Executive Director, Secretariat for International Affairs and Development, International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI), The Earth Institute
: Water and Sanitation:
Transcript
Lisa Anderson: We're going to begin with
Roberto Lenton, who will be talking about water and sanitation.
He is at Columbia, he is at the International Research Institute
for Climate Prediction here at the Earth Institute. Why don't
you begin? Thanks.
Roberto Lenton: Thanks very much, Lisa. I'm
here on behalf of the task force on water and sanitation.
What I want to do is tell you a little bit about the way in
which we understand the problem, and then move on to some
of our ideas and what can be done about it, and hopefully
keep this reasonably short.
I guess in many ways the problem of water and sanitation is
for many people in this audience perhaps the easiest to grasp.
All of us understand taps, all of us understand toilets. We
also take it very much for granted. It's part of our everyday
lives. I guess the problem that we're dealing with is that
in many, many parts of the world, for many billions of people,
this is not in fact something that can be taken for granted.
There are 1.1 billion people who don't have access to safe
drinking water; there are 2.4 billion people who don't have
access to good sanitation. The kinds of things that we have
very much as parts of our lives are very much absent in the
lives of many people around the world.
It's a problem in most developing countries. It's primarily
a problem in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as was the
case in other problems that we've discussed today. It's a
rural and an urban problem as well, but it is fundamentally,
in terms of numbers, incredibly strong in many rural areas
around the world.
Just to give you some examples, 56 percent of rural people
in sub-Saharan Africa don't have access to safe water, and
fully 78 percent of rural people in South Asia lack access
to good sanitation. But what are the impacts of the lack of
water and sanitation to so many people around the world?
Clearly there are health impacts—something of the order
of 2.2 million cases of diarrheal diseases per year. Clearly
there are economic impacts resulting from the disease, but
also resulting from the time burden that obliges so many people
to spend—especially women—to spend very large
amounts of their time every day in the collection of water.
And it has huge impacts on human dignity, particularly the
issue of sanitation—particularly for women. Lack of
access to private sanitation has immeasurable impacts on the
dignity of people around the world.
All of these are fundamental impacts that we have to deal
with. That's essentially what the Millennium Development Goal
aimed at addressing. In its direct wording the MDG targets
for water and sanitation are aiming to halve by the year 2015
the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe
drinking water and to basic sanitation. I should add that
the additional target of basic sanitation was one of the important
outcomes of Johannesburg. Prior to that we did not have a
globally-agreed-upon sanitation goal.
As I said earlier, it's a rural and an urban problem, so essentially
we have urban sanitation, rural sanitation, urban water, rural
water as the four dimensions of our target. Let me also add,
though, that that is the very specific target that the MDGs
are aiming at, but water has a role in every single one of
the Millennium Development Goals and targets, and so part
of the way in which we view the world in the task force is
to look at the ways in which water impacts on the health goal,
on the poverty goal, on the hunger goal, and devise strategies
in ways that those goals can be achieved more effectively.
Just to take one example, water in the dry season in Bangladesh
can have an enormous impact on livelihoods and income generation
for the poor, especially for landless poor, so we've got to
think of water in its multiple manifestations, and not simply
in terms of its narrow connotation.
Let me say a little bit about what we think as what needs
to be done. Let me start by emphasizing that our view is very
much that the targets are achievable targets. This is not
simply optimism; this is the recognition that there are many
cases around the world where targets have been achieved. Just
to give you two examples, South Africa since the end of apartheid
has made remarkable progress in providing access to drinking
water to populations that earlier did not have it. That is
a combination of getting institutions right, getting policies
right, getting the financing in place, and getting appropriate
technology.
Another example, at a community level, the Urangi pilot project
in Karachi, one of the worst slums around the world—enormous
progress made in terms of sanitation through the right combination
of institutions and technologies.
We start with a very strong sort of understanding that these
goals can be achieved, but we recognize at the same time that
the experience in South Africa, in Urangi, and elsewhere,
suggests that you have to work simultaneously on a combination
of the appropriate technology, the right institutions, and
getting the financing appropriately in place. None of this
is simple, but at the same time it's not rocket science. It's
a question of working on issues such as making sure that you
can supply water without damaging the ecosystems, making sure
that you can put sanitation technologies in place without
adversely impacting the environment; it means on the institutional
side making sure that you appropriate roles for government.
Moving from direct service delivery into more of a regulatory
approach, you've got to make sure that you have appropriate
decentralization. On the financial side, you've got to make
sure that you cover not only the investment costs, but also
the operating costs, and that you look at ways in which you
can both get some degree of cost recovery so that there is
a sense of ownership at community levels, but combine that
in such a way that you don't impact on the affordability by
poor communities of the systems that have be in place.
All of this is within the water area, but we also recognize
that these kinds of policies have to be accompanied by progress
in a number of related areas; we've got to make progress in
education; we've got to make progress in gender equality;
we've got to make progress on the poverty front if we're going
to have a chance of addressing these Millennium Development
Goals.
Let me just end with a couple of points that related to the
point that I made earlier, that water is not simply drinking
water, and it's not simply providing sanitation services.
Water has a role in all the other Millennium Development Goals.
If our commitment is for all the MDGs and not simply that
specific target, we've got to find ways to manage water so
that you can have multiple and positive impacts on all of
these goals.
One thing, of course, is we've got to manage the resource
of water in an integrated way, but we've also got to look
for win / win solutions that really hit many of the targets
simultaneously. Pedro Sanchez was talking earlier about school
lunches. Imagine if, in addition to school lunches, you have
school latrines, the impacts that it would have on education,
especially for girls, the impact that it would have on hygiene
practices back in the household, and of course the impacts
that it would have directly in terms of health would be innumerable.
The kinds of things that we're trying to do in our task force
and in the project as a whole is look for interventions that
really hit at many of these Millennium Development Goals simultaneously.
Thank you very much.
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Task Force Member Charles McNeill, Environment Program Team Manager and Biodiversity Conservation & Poverty Reduction Advisor, United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
: Environmental Sustainability: Transcript
Lisa Anderson: Thank you. We'll now turn
to environmental sustainability, and we'll be hearing from
task-force member Charles McNeill from the environment program,
team manager and biodiversity, conservation, and poverty-reduction
advisor—now there's a job—at UNDP.
Charles McNeill: Good afternoon.
The state of the world's environment in eight minutes. Are
you ready? First of all, I want to thank you for being here.
As far as I'm concerned there's no more important body of
work than this Millennium Project anywhere on the planet.
This is the work that needs to be done and thanks for your
interest, and we're going to need to broaden this base of
support even wider than we are here today.
I'm going to report just briefly on some of the results of
the task force and also some previous work that the UN system
with the World Bank and other agencies have undertaken. Basically
we're looking at the relationship between environment and
poverty reduction, because that's really what we have to do.
The task force that I'm reporting on is the one called Ensure
Environmental Sustainability. The particular target that we're
addressing is to integrate the principles of sustainable development
into country policies and programs, and reverse the loss of
environmental resources. In shorthand I'm going to use the
term "environmental management" to cover that broad
area, and I'm going to be talking a lot about ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services are those things, those goods, those benefits,
that we get from our ecosystems that most of us take for granted:
the food, the water, the air, the pollution control, the flood
control, all these things that are invisibly making things
work behind the scenes.
Our observation on this task force is that maintaining those
services is essential for the achievement of the MDGs. Just
as the MDGs are a package, I'm going to be stepping through
briefly the role of environment with each of the other goals,
how environment can contribute to achieving them, and how
you can achieve those other goals in a way that protects the
environment, because obviously it makes no sense to end poverty
today just on a degraded environment that yields poverty tomorrow.
We obviously have to be thinking about achieving these goals
in a way that's sustainable.
First of all, environment and poverty. The closer we look,
the more intricate are those linkages. For example, in Zimbabwe
in the poorest households, the studies show that 40 percent
of their income comes directly from the environment around
them. The closer we look the more we see environment is not
a luxury, it's a life and death issue for the poor. This is
kind of a different mindset, I think, than you hear about
in most parts of the world. The more we look we also see the
environmental issues of the developing world, the more closely
you look the more it comes back to us right here in this room,
and to the developed world as well. I'm going to make that
point in a couple of ways.
The poor, they're most affected by unclean water, indoor air
pollution, toxic chemicals. As I said, environment is a life-and-death
issue, and yet the good news of our studies is that there
are a number of win / win examples. There are examples whereby
the environment's protected and poverty reduced. I was just
in Costa Rica a few months ago in the Talamanca community
and the closest, most remote of the country, where a winner
of the Equator Prize was, and I saw them growing organic products—fair
trade, shade grown. They were increasing their income dramatically,
there was ecotourism going on, there was a tremendous number
of initiatives, win / win initiatives that were going on there.
Then looking into India, tribal people in the south of India
are getting benefits from the genetic resources they've discovered.
Then you could come to New York, you don't have to go any
further than this to see the benefits of ecosystems. Here
our water supply is a function of the Catskill Mountains and
the ecosystem services. There was a choice made. You could've
a few years ago invested five to eight billion dollars in
a filtration plant with annual costs of 500 million a year,
or you could have a one-time expenditure of 1.5 billion to
restore the ecosystems for our water. In the city, that's
a perfect example of a win / win kind of example of the kinds
of things we need to upscale.
There are also lose / lose examples. Hurricane Mitch, when
you look at that, 18,000 people lost their lives. Why? Because
degraded ecosystems caused floods, caused mudslides, caused
all these terrible things. In Belize, where the environment
is protected and well managed, there was very little devastation.
It's another example of where you need to protect the environment
to have the poverty-reduction benefits.
The bottom line here is that we're seeing that in ignoring
environmental soundness of growth, even if that would lead
to short-term benefits, is not a solution. It can undermine
growth itself. You can not assume that environmental management
is a luxury that can be deferred until later. That's an important
conclusion. A lot of people say, "Why worry about environment?
Do that later." The truth is there are countless examples
when the environment is mismanaged poverty persists and actually
gets worse.
Okay, hunger. The links between environment and hunger—there
are a number of win / win examples there. I don't have time
to go into it, but cassava, the major food crop in Africa,
some years was threatened by a pest. Two hundred million African
farmers put at risk, the losses up to 80 percent, and what
was found was biological control. Pests from the center of
origin of the cassava introduced, eliminated the pest, and
increased the yields back up to 95 percent. These are examples
of win / win, and we're cataloguing these examples of where
you protect the environment and eradicate poverty at the same
time. You don't have to sacrifice one or the other. Of course,
there are trade-offs, we need to look at those as well, but
I want you to know there are countless examples in our work
of win / win examples.
Let's look at the education and gender goals. These connections
between environment are a little bit more tenuous, but it's
true that women and children, particularly girl children,
spend hours a day gathering wood, fodder, and water. The degradation
of the water, the degradation of the forest, is leading to
more of that burden on their time, on their ability to learn,
to go to school, education and income generation, so that
degradation of the environment is a critical stumbling block
to achieving the education and gender goals.
Let's look at health. Poor environmental management is a major
cause of ill health. In fact, the total burden of disease
in poor countries is about twice that of rich countries, but
the disease burden from environmental causes is ten times
more in developing countries than developed. Enormous burden.
It's very underappreciated, that. But for example, of the
seven million people who died prematurely from environment-related
causes, three million from water-related diseases, two million
from indoor air pollution, another million from urban air
pollution, and another million from malaria. Environmental
degradation is a major health risk, and another reason and
another place that major attention needs to be placed. The
point there is that any strategy on child mortality has got
to take environmental management into account.
There are solutions. In terms of biodiversity, 150 of the
most widely used drugs all come from natural products, a hundred
billion dollars in products of pharmaceuticals. Eighty percent
of the world in developing countries depends on their plants
in their local environment for their health needs. There are
a couple of exciting examples happening. Cone snails, there's
a particular peptide toxin that cone snails invest in their
victims. It actually is a thousand times more potent than
morphine and it's not addictive. These are examples of the
kinds of products that are out there. The problem is the cone
snail is endangered because the coral reefs it lives on are
endangered as well.
In Indonesia, a possible cure for HIV / AIDS was found. The
researchers went back to that site, they couldn't find the
tree. In fact, it may be extinct. So a potential cure for
HIV / AIDS disappeared overnight. Fortunately, a relative
of that tree had some of the compounds, but not fully as powerful.
Okay. Let's see. I think I'd better get some water.
There are two major areas I want to go into. Goal eight, this
is where we come into it, and this is why it's so important
that we're having this conversation in this room, and that
is that overconsumption in our countries is the major cause
of environmental degradation in many of the developing world.
In fact, those of us are a fifth of the world's population,
the richest countries account for some 86 percent of the total
global consumption. It's this consumption that's causing some
problems.
A couple of examples are very close to home. Last May 13,
2002, was a very sad day for developing farmers in the developing
world. That's the day when the U.S. Farm Bill passed. Billions
and billions of dollars of subsidies going into American farmers
so that the dumping of subsidized imports into developing
markets, so small farmers can't compete. The corn, the maize,
the rice, the sorghum, they can't compete because we're dumping
the products onto them. UNDP estimates that U.S. farm subsidies
alone invest about fifty billion dollars a year, cost about
fifty billion dollars a year in lost income for small farmers.
The World Bank estimates: fifty billion dollars in total assistance
to developing world. Fifty billion dollars in and fifty billion
dollars out, and it's probably a lot more than that. These
are examples of the policy environment that's actually crippling
and undermining the very goals that we're trying to achieve.
Fisheries, the same thing, forests the same thing. There are
subsidies that are causing the wrong things to happen. Clearly,
our task force is looking into how to deal with those subsidies.
Last climate issue I want to deal with is climate change.
As you know, most of the carbon in the air is coming from
us, but what are the impacts? It's the developing world that's
crippled by that. In Bangladesh the risk of flooding is predicted
increased 20 percent. In Nigeria, Brazil, the food production
predictions for 2020 are 5 to 10 percent down as a result
of climate change. Natural disasters, while natural disasters
strike everywhere, 97 percent of the deaths related to natural
disasters happen in the developing world. In fact, the economic
impact is huge. Even insurance companies are getting into
the business now, they realize this is big business. It's
actually our responsibility to deal with this, and the impacts
on the poverty of the developing world are huge.
Emerging diseases, I could talk for an hour about the emerging
diseases as a result as well. These are just some of the impacts
that we need to be aware of in our work to achieve the MDGs.
But it's not all a bad story. There are some successes. The
Montreal Protocol. Just in 1986 we were producing 1.1 million
tons of ozone-depleting substances; now it's less than 100,000
tons. This is because of international agreements. The stopping
of the emission of ozone-depleting substances—chlorofluorocarbons,
that actually degrade the ozone layer, allow radiation that
causes harm to human health, plants, and green ecosystems—that's
been essentially abated. That's all because of cooperation,
so it's an example that we can win this battle, there are
some successes. Also, by the way, twenty million cases of
skin cancer will be avoided because of that.
Now, emerging policy recommendations. Am I way over time?
Okay, good, I'll just close.
Basically implied in what I've said are the recommendations.
They have to do with capacity building, getting the economic
instruments right. It's about incentives, it's about subsidies,
and it's about science and technology. We are proposing that
a global life observatory be established so we can actually
track the progress that we're making in terms of the health
of the ecosystems. We're making some other recommendations.
The final one I want to say is when I was standing in Talamanca
a few months ago and I was talking to Indian farmers, they
were growing organic products, full intact forest, they were
happy and healthy. Right across the river was another development
modality and model, and across the river there was monoculture,
agrochemical intensive planting farm going on, and basic poisoning
the river, the water, and the people's lives. These were the
two competing models. So far the organic, shade-grown, fair-trade
model was winning the day, but it all depends on the decisions
that you and I make in this room, and the decisions the developing
world makes. I just wanted to make that connection—the
lifestyle choices we make have everything to do whether these
MDGs are achieved are not. Thank you for your interest.
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Task Force Coordinator Elliott Sclar, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University: Slum Dwellers: Transcript
Lisa Anderson: That was great. That was sixteen minutes worth
of information in eight minutes. Our final panelist this afternoon
is Professor Eliot Sclar, who is the Director of the Urban
Planning Program here at Columbia, and he's going to be talking
about improving the lives of slum dwellers.
Eliot Sclar: Thank you. I'll give you four minutes in eight.
I appreciate being here and I think the Millennium Development
Goals project is probably one of the most important things
that we could be working on right now, for a lot of reasons
that Jeff is probably the best salesman for in helping us
to understand. The task force that I coordinate has the inelegant
title Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers. It comes out of
one of the goals which is to improve the lives of a hundred
million slum dwellers by the year 2020. Everybody else has
until 2015, we get five more years. We don't know why but
we're grateful for it because the problem is daunting.
When I first heard this, when I got the first e-mail from
Jeff, it said, "Want you to coordinate this task force,
I want you to develop a plan to improve the lives of a hundred
million people." I can't count that high. But what I
began to realize very early on is that in some ways that number
is actually a trivial number. It became very clear to our
task force the number's trivial.
The UN Habitat has been trying to estimate the number of slum
dwellers—never mind the term "slum dweller"
is one of those terms that's very hard to put a handle on,
and we probably have as many ways of counting as, you know,
as we do people who do the counting. As a rough yardstick,
we're talking about right now close to a billion people. So
even if we're talking about a hundred million we're talking
about one in ten. By roughly 2030, which is ten years after
we're finished, the number would be about two billion. So
even if we succeeded at one in ten, it would've been one in
twenty by almost by the time our work would wind down.
We're actually the only task force that basically has to deal
with urbanization, because we're talking about one of the
results of global urbanization, and right now there are six
billion people, we're talking eight billion by 2030. We're
talking about one-sixth now, we're going to be talking about
one-quarter if nothing is done. You can't separate the issue
of improving the lives of slum dwellers from the issue of
how do we make urbanization work, or more specifically, how
do we make cities work for poor people.
Since the oldest cities go back about 10,000 years, the first
urban settlements, and from then till now there's been this
inexorable movement towards urban living, and that's not stopping.
We're talking about a planet where well over half of the population
lives in urban environments. It's going up towards three-quarters.
The fastest growing cities are in the low income countries.
So this problem of urbanization and slum dwelling can't be
separated, and it can't be separated from the other problems.
It's an economic problem, too.
Our task force held our meeting at early April. We were down
in Sao Paulo, and it was a very heartening meeting, worked
very well for our task force. One of the things that did happen
was the President Lula of Brazil actually came to meet with
us, and this is an issue that they've taken on very, very
much and embraced in Brazil. When we went out and visited
one of the favelas we visited, walked around, and I asked
the person who was showing me around, "What percentage
of the households here are female headed?" Eighty percent.
"What's the income level?" Well, 80 percent of the
households have incomes of less than $140 a month. When I
walked around it was very clear, slums are a manifestation
of a form of urbanization and have to do with how economic
developing is going to proceed, and who's going to get the
benefits from it, and who isn't.
It's not just a question of the slums; it becomes a question
of the water and sanitation. We walked down an alley in one
of the favelas and all the houses I saw on one side of the
street, they're all spewing water and garbage into open pits
in the back. While we're standing there looking at this, a
little boy came up, one of those cute little boys with an
engaging face that smiled at you immediately and you take
his picture because he's so cute, and he began to follow us
around, and I ended up going home with him, and I met his
mother. She had a younger child, and she looked like a woman
in her fifties, and she had four young children and she was
a widow, and she lived in a very tiny room that faces basically
this sewer.
The issues of how this family is going to have income, how
she gets to work, the question for us— improving
the lives of slum dwellers, improving their housing is part
of it—means working with people in these neighborhoods.
Part of our task force is comprised of people who work with
and are active in working with groups of slum dwellers from
around the world.
Some of our task force members are World Bank, UN people,
some of them are academics, some of them work in the civil
sector, represent mayors and localities, and we basically
see this as on the one hand how do you mitigate the existing
problem, but the second piece for us is what are we going
to do to keep the problem from happening and getting worse
in going forward.
That means to us that we're also dealing with questions of
comprehensive urban planning, we're dealing with questions
of if you know people are coming how are you going to prepare
for them, if you know they're going to have to get to work
can you build transportation systems that are environmentally
clean, that get people to work? If you're going to do slum
upgrading, can you do slum upgrading and build in recreational
spaces, can you build in not just roads?
One of the things that struck me about a lot of the slum upgrading
I looked at, roads would be paved, and that was nice, but
there were no sidewalks. There was no public transportation
nearby. There were no playgrounds. And it very much becomes
a question of putting all the pieces together, and it becomes
a question of working with people.
Some of the people who live in slums live in places they shouldn't
be living. Some of them are living on top of landfills, some
of them are living on watershed areas, and if you're going
to get people to move you have to work with them. They know
what they need, they know where they have to be. In Caracas
a few years ago we were dealing with mudslides, where 34,000
people lost their lives, and the question becomes how do you
keep them from going back to those hills? Well, it really
is a question of community organization, it's a question of
working with mayors, it's a question of looking around the
world at best practices.
By the way, we don't also like the term "best practices."
We talk about "best principles," because what happens
with best practices is somebody said, "Well, in Lima,
Peru they did X. Why can't you do that in Bangkok?" The
answer is Bangkok isn't Lima, but what's the principle that
worked there that could work here? So we're interested in
finding out what the principles are, and how to transfer them.
We're interested in figuring out what kind of structural issues,
from issues of tenure to issues of regulation to issues of
zoning, what kind of regulatory structure is supportive of
improving the situation? We're interested in issues of where
people work, how they get to work, issues of how you link
them up to the economy.
One of the most important issues for us is people have to
be citizens. One of the things that strikes us, they have
to be citizens with rights, they have to also have obligations.
One of the things that strikes us is the fastest growing parts
of most cities are the squatter settlements. When you go to
the cities and you ask for maps and you look at the site plans,
you'll see the map of the central city and you'll see a gray
area. The fastest growing part of these cities are these gray
areas, and it's as if we're pretending they don't exist.
What we have to do is say, "Hey, this is where the metropolitan
area is growing, this is where we have to be doing the planning,
and you can't do it without bringing everybody on board."
A lot of what we're going to be concerned about is not just
ideas, but the questions of process and how do you make these
things happen effectively. We can't do our work without all
the other task forces, and it's very clear to us that for
this to work out there's going to be have to be close relationships
with all of them. Thank you.
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Questions and Answers: Transcript
Lisa Anderson: Thank you all. We now have an opportunity,
a short one once again, for some questions and comments. Professor
Rosen.
Sumner Rosen: Sumner Rosen from Columbia Emeritus. I want
to make two political comments. The first has to do with Brazil.
Eliot Sclar talked about President Lula. People should be
aware that this is an authentic workers' party president,
the only one really in a major country in the world with a
serious agenda of progressive change along the lines we've
been talking about, an effort that deserves our closest scrutiny
and our strongest support, which it's not yet getting.
The second comment is this. listening to the last three hours
or so and going down a mental checklist, it strikes me, and
I think it will strike others, that the Bush administration
fails on every single count of what we've talked about. It's
not been said. Jeff Sachs hinted at it a couple of times,
but I want to make the point very explicitly, that if we in
the United States are serious about this effort, that has
to include a change of regime in the United States, and a
change of priorities, and a change of politics that takes
these issues seriously and authentically and embraces them
as part of our national mission.
Gordon McCormick: My name is Gordon McCormick, I had a microcredit
bank in Haiti. I'm interested in if you have any sense of
the cost per household of putting potable water and sanitation
into houses on a global basis when you measure it against
national income. Does it take twenty years' national income,
one year, half a year? Are you measuring that at all?
Roberto Lenton: The estimates of cost vary enormously, but
let me just give you some ballpark figures, which is essentially
that achieving the goals for water supply and sanitation would
take an additional investment of the order of 27, 30 billion
dollars a year. The figure is not a frightening figure by
any means. Where some of the estimates go up is when you start
looking at the costs of waste water disposal and drainage.
So it comes into the issue of environmental sustainability.
Achieving the water supply and sanitation goals while at the
same time protecting the environment requires investing in
the water disposal and sewage side, and that's expensive.
James Deutsch: My name's James Deutsch from the Wildlife Conservation
Society and also from AID SPAN. I have a question for Charles
McNeill. Of the various imperative and admirable Millennium
Development Goals, the goal of reducing the loss of biodiversity
seems to have been the most neglected. I wondered whether
that's because sometimes it's difficult to draw a connection
between that goal and other goals more related to poverty
reduction. I wanted to ask you and ask others who are experts
in this room whether that goal is seen as an end in itself,
or whether it must be seen only as a means to reducing poverty?
Charles McNeill: Great, good question. It's actually an indicator.
There's an indicator called percentage of the country in protected
area, and that's an indicator, which is an indicator for the
target that I was talking about. I think you're right that
there is some unclarity in the world's perception of the linkages
between biodiversity ecosystems and these productive enterprises,
and that's why I was wanting to emphasize that so much, because
if those benefits are quantified, are properly valued, then
the right kinds of decisions can be made. I do think there's
some misunderstanding of the markets, improper pricing that's
going on that's leading to the wrong kinds of activities,
and I think that is one of the things that we as a task force
need to resolve.
I think you're also getting to the point about what about
the inherent value of biodiversity, what about the cultural,
aesthetic, spiritual, other nonquantifiable values that are
underestimated? For example, indigenous people are some of
the best protectors of biodiversity in the world today, and
they actually value their land in a whole different way than
we do. I think that we need to pay attention to the valuation
aspect, but also not forget the inherent value of biodiversity,
and somehow we have to walk that line and balance both those
needs. I think implicit in your question is the fact that
this area, I think this environmental sustainability goal
is the least well understood and least well appreciated of
all of them, and it's our job to continue to make the case
of those linkages and to really do a major education campaign,
a public awareness campaign, to elucidate the linkages of
these issues, as you're pointing to.
Edwin Adkins: Hi, my name's Edwin Adkins, I'm a student in
earth and environmental engineering. I notice there are several
other fellow students here, too, so I'm partly speaking on
behalf of them, and maybe that's a bit of hubris, but I'll
go ahead anyway. It's partly a comment and that leads to a
question, and the comment is that even here at Columbia where
the mandate and agenda of the Earth Institute is varied and
thriving in many ways, I think there are some gaps between
students who may want to participate and prepare themselves
for careers in addressing these problems and those sort of
classes that are offered, those sort of experiences that are
available. I was wondering if whichever of you would choose
to do this could speak a little to the roles that beginning
career people or students, younger folks, have in the kinds
of programs that you're putting in place, and also what kind
of skills are most essential for people who may be looking
forward to work in this area? Thanks.
Lisa Anderson: Let me just say a plug for a new class Professor
Sclar's going to be offering, Global Slums, next year.
Eliot Sclar: It's very clear to me that the work that we're
doing at the task forces have to be brought back to the students
here, and brought back to the school. It's one of those epiphanies
I had, I had a lot of epiphanies in Brazil, but one of the
ones that I had was that we really had to start working this
into the curriculum, the Millennium Goals had to become part
of the curriculum.
The question that you're raising about how to prepare for
a career, that's not an easy one. In a sense it's not hard
to answer, but it's not easy to answer. It's one of those
questions that begins with an unequivocal "it depends,"
and it seems to me what you should be doing now is, besides
taking the courses that you're taking and taking care of those
pieces of business and looking—the nice thing about
being at Columbia is it's an amazing catalogue of places that
you can take things—but you ought to be looking
at the agencies that are doing things that are interesting,
and you ought to go now and interview.
Don't go looking for a job, go and interview somebody and
say, "I'm going to be graduating in a year. I'd like
to know what you do here." They'll know you and you'll
know them and you'll get a sense of what they're looking for.
It seems to me that that kind of due diligence becomes important,
because what you're doing and what we're doing in some ways
is we're combining some old fields and inventing some new
ways, and the people, ironically, who will be carrying it
forward are going to be your generation, not ours. We'll get
this stuff going but you're the ones that are going to articulate
it. I think it's going to take some of us doing the courses
but a lot of you doing some of the going around and asking
the questions.
Roberto Lenton: Let me just add a couple of comments on the
question of what kind of preparation is best. If you ask people
who are working on one or another aspect of the Millennium
Development Goals, whether they're on the task forces or whether
they're working with an NGO on the ground or whether they're
with the UN system, most of them I think will tell you that
they would have an academic degree in a particularly relevant
area. Mine happens to be engineering, yours is biology, others
would be in rural sociology, others in economics. But virtually
everybody, I think, would say that they added other disciplines,
either during the time that they were studying or when they
went into the field afterwards. It's simply not possible to
deal with these issues with a uni-disciplinary viewpoint,
absolutely impossible.
Charles McNeill: I'd say that the kinds of classes going on
on this campus are some of the best preparation I could think
of for a career in this work. The kind of thing we're doing
here today could be the best preparation I could think of.
Also I think some strong technical background in a related
field, but then I think what really makes it is your ability
to make things happen, and your commitment to the issues.
That really translates well I think in institutions, and just
being here and the kinds of issues that you're concerned with,
that's the right preparation. That's all I can say.
Winifred Zubin: Winifred Zubin, I'm a student at the Center
for Environmental Research and Conservation here at Columbia.
I wanted to raise a question that goes beyond the issue of
the regime change here in this country, and it's about the
standard of living and our commitment to consumerism in the
developed countries around the world, which requires the substantial
acquisition and use of resources to support the standard of
living. If the Millennium Goals are successful in the approach
to poverty reduction, it only improves the standard of living
perhaps in the model of consumerism that we most experience
here. I'd like to get your reaction to that, the panelists,
and whether there is any potential for progress and using
less of our natural resources and in building sustainable
planet, given a rise in the standards of living throughout
the world?
Eliot Sclar: The question you ask opens up a larger issue,
but once again we go back to one interesting fact—Sao
Paulo is the largest market in the world for private helicopters.
The gap there between wealth and poverty becomes enormous,
and my sense is that I don't think preaching at people or
asking them to cut their consumption is going to work. But
asking them to at least take the seven-tenths of one percent
GDP approach to start investing, it seems to me works. The
other piece that works, when I went into Sao Paulo sitting
in traffic jams, realizing the helicopter market, looking
at these gaps, I realized if we improve things in Sao Paulo,
it's not just improving the lives of the poor, it's making
the city work for more affluent people, too.
In other words, my sense is the piece of that that we can
work on is at least saying this is for everybody, it's sort
of what Charles said earlier, in other words, improving biodiversity,
improving the planet makes things better. I think the same
thing happens with the issue of poverty. Poverty is expensive
to maintain, it is really very costly, and when we talk about
water systems and sewer systems I don't see those as costs,
I see those as investments, that if you give people tenure
you free them up to be in the labor market, if they don't
have to spend three hours a day getting clean water, that's
more hours they can be doing other things. I look at these
things as investments, and I look at these things as investments
that makes us all better off. That would be my take on it.
Charles McNeill: Just a thought—if you look at the
quality of life in this country compared to Europe, for example,
I think the European per capita energy consumption is about
50 percent of what this is. Clearly you can do a lot with
a little, we can do much better here. It isn't necessarily
a matter of giving up a lifestyle, it's a matter of doing
it more efficiently, and that's just one example. Of course,
as I said, there are choices that we can make in the marketplace;
we can get the same kind of coffee either in a way that relied
on a deforested slope, or we could actually get coffee that
was grown under protected forest. It's choices that we make
that have everything to do with the path of development that
goes on in the South as well.
Woman: Actually, the question is for the panel. The ethical
utilitarian term "tragedy of commons" can best define
the goal number seven, this sustainability. How do you recommend
to actually go to the poor and tell them that your actions
actually might be harming the environment? How do you recommend
to do that? I come from Bombay, India, and there are slums
which are four by four with no windows. You're talking to
people who can not think beyond the everyday meal. These are
people who get up at 2 A.M. every morning to have two buckets
of water. Where is this whole question of sustainability going
to come to them, when they are not able to have their basic
needs accomplished? This whole question of tragedy of commons
comes into picture; how do you go and convince them?
Eliot Sclar: I'm sorry, convince them of which piece, that—
Lisa Anderson: That they should care about environmental sustainability?
Eliot Sclar: Oh, okay.
Roberto Lenton: Let me take one crack at this, because it's
clearly an issue that very much relates to water resources,
whether it be ground water or surface water. It seems to me
it's not so much an issue of the poor or the non-poor. Managing
common property resources is a problem regardless. I think
you have plenty of good examples at the community level in
very, very poor communities, where you do have systems to
manage the common properties in ways that are both equitable
and efficient. I wouldn't draw the line in terms of poor and
non-poor. I think it's a difficult institutional issue that
you need to get at in a number of different ways, but it's
not the dividing line.
Charles McNeill: I wouldn't go to the poor and say that. In
fact, the result of our studies is quite the contrary in many
cases, that given the choices the poor will not choose the
environmentally degrading one. In fact, I think our earlier
speaker from Malaysia was talking about that since Rio there
may not have been a lot of great macropolitical changes and
developments, but at the local level there's a tremendous
explosion of innovation and successful examples of integrating
environment and poverty. We're seeing that very clearly in
our work at the UN. So I think it really isn't the poor, this
idea of blaming the poor for the environmental degradation
is r eally not what it's about. In fact, as I was also saying,
it's really our own overconsumption that's causing most of
these problems, so it's not a matter of actually—and
I don't think you were saying that, that we should go and
blame the poor—but it's really our experiences that
when given choices and given options that the sustainable
options are the ones the poor will choose.
Eliot Sclar: It seems to me that people make choices among
available options, and that part of what some of the work
has to be about is improving the range of options they get
to choose among, and giving them—well, whether it's
pure ownership, but giving them ownership in some way of the
resource so that it's theirs. It seems to me that that's some
of the challenge we have. It's not a challenge of telling
them to change what they do, it's a challenge of putting more
options in front of them, and structuring them so that they're
meaningful options.
Lisa Anderson: Okay, we have time for two
quick questions. Go ahead.
Perra Wells: Thank you. My name is Perra
Wells. I'm with the World Federation of United Nations Associations,
and we're an NGO connected to the United Nations which has
United Nations associations in over a hundred countries around
the world. Our top priority is the implementation of the Millennium
Development Goals. First of all, I want to congratulate you,
I think this seminar has been fabulous example of a civil
society event which is generating a lot of interesting ideas.
I have two points I'd really like to make. One is I'd like
if you could inform us how you propose to share the information
that's created out of today so that it goes wider, and secondly
to mention that we've launched an online global survey of
the knowledge and level of engagement of civil society people
all around the world. Any of you who are connected with NGOs,
I'd like to suggest to you complete the survey. It's on our
Web site, and our organization is called WFUNA, wfuna.org.
I please encourage you to do so, and to let you know that
the results of this survey, which will probably reach over
5,000 people around the world, probably more, will be available
for you all as a research tool. It'll be privacy protected,
so it's our contribution to the ongoing energizing of people
all over the world to feel an ownership of the MDGs, because
I think that's the big message that's come out of today. Thank
you.
Lisa Anderson: Thank you very much. I'll
leave the question of dissemination to a little bit later.
We're almost done. Why don't you?
Bonnie Ling Weber: My name is Bonnie Ling Weber, I run a neighborhood
environmental education group on the upper east side, and
I'm also an investor, so I have a statement and I have a question.
My statement is that I think one of the most important things
was said by Dr. Lee when he said that educated young people
frustrated by unemployment are very dangerous. The investors
that I see and the businesspeople would not find this that
interesting, what we heard here today, but if you told them
that if we don't make changes that were stated here today
they're going to be blown to kingdom come, I think you'd get
their attention. We can't wait to just get the politicians
out in two years or six years or whatever, we have to get
the attention of the people now, the money people. I'd like
to know if there is a Web site that we can go to for getting
the information quickly on the sustainable choices that we
can make. Thank you for everything, it was wonderful.
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Closing Remarks: Transcript
Lisa Anderson: Perhaps I'll wrap the session
up now and give an opportunity to Jeff Sachs to talk about
the Earth Institute Web site for a minute, which is the answer
to both of these last questions, about dissemination and continuing
of conversations like this.
I think this has been an extremely productive conversation
this afternoon. I hope for you, and certainly for us, it's
pretty clear that there are a lot of research needs, things
that people have to conduct research on, both for the task
forces and for us collectively. Those of you who are students
thinking about research topics or thinking about what students
might do, there's a list of topics coming out of this afternoon.
We clearly also have an issue that's sort of percolated through
the entire afternoon of the issue of sort of having a sense
that, although there's still research to be done and there
are a lot of questions, there are many things where the technical
solutions are available, and it is a question of we've called
it political will, we've called it political institutions,
we've called it a whole variety of questions of how you get
this onto the world agenda. I think that's clearly something
that we all need to be thinking about quite a lot, to think
systematically about how these sorts of ideas are disseminated,
how they become part of the way we think about our responsibilities
in the world.
We talk a lot at the Earth Institute and here at Columbia
about decision-making in conditions of scientific uncertainty.
It probably would make sense for us also to think about scientific
certainty in the absence of decision-making, that being part
of our problem, I think. But clearly we've made a good start
this afternoon in pushing forward that agenda. There will
be expressions in the Columbia curriculum of this kind of
thing, as Professor Sclar suggested, and we will be continuing
the research, both on the substantive issues and on this larger
question of how to get further along on the agenda of both
states and citizens these kinds of challenges to us all, clearly
important things. Let me give Jeff Sachs a minute or two to
tell you a little bit, as I say, about the Earth Institute
Web site, and then I think we're finished for the day. Once
again I'd like to thank all of our panelists, but especially
you.
Jeffrey Sachs: Thanks a lot. First, can
we think Dean Lisa Anderson for such an outstanding job?
Second, thank you for such active participation with so many
wonderful ideas, and there are a lot of NGOs around, we'd
like to make sure that there's a continuing contact and dialogue.
There are two Web sites that I'd like to give you. One is
the Web site of the UN Millennium Project, and it's got a
clever name, UN Millennium Project, www.unmillenniumproject.org.
On that Web site there's a "Contact Us," I understand.
Is that right? So you can make direct contact for further
information. There are a lot of background papers and information
about the MDGs and as we build up the project I think you'll
find more and more. There are a few missing papers like mine,
not done yet, but we will constantly be putting on new information,
and hope that you will find that a way to stay in contact
with us.
The second Web site I'd like to urge you to visit is the Earth
Institute's Web site, which is www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu.
That is a wonderful Web site with all sorts of things from
across this quite large and dynamic organization with projects
all over the world, a good map to find out what's going on
in different areas, so if you're particularly interested in
a particular region or country you'll find out some of the
projects going on.
I am really thrilled with the students here, being here and
also pressing us to do more, to do more, to do more—that's
our job but also our passion. We want advice from you as well
on the question of what more can we do. We're adding a new
Ph.D. program soon in sustainable development, and we're working
very hard to get some new Masters programs on line, and some
new special cross-cutting thematic areas of work, where we
think there'll be lots of opportunities for students. Sustainable
energy, for example, which is one of the most exciting and
intellectually stimulating areas, headed by Professor Klaus
Lachner here. We're hoping to start a new major project with
Roberto Lenton and Professor Manu Lao on water, so we have
ideas about a major program on water, and many other areas
as well. With your interest that gives us the impetus to do
more.
Let me say again, joining with Dean Lisa Anderson, we're really
grateful for all of your participation, for your interest,
and we anticipate and look forward to your collaboration in
the years ahead on this absolutely important and thrilling
venture that we're all on. Thanks very much.
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