BirdLife Many Local Groups are involved in small-scale income generating activities, such as bee-keeping for honey production in Cameroon Zoom In

World leaders urged to acknowledge links between ecosystems and poverty

14-09-2005

2005 UN World Summit - Millennium Development Goals

Political leaders attending the UN Summit in New York will gather with Nobel prize winners and figures from the world of entertainment, at a dinner organised by the environmental community to highlight the importance of healthy ecosystems for human wellbeing.

The dinner will focus the world's attention on the emerging coalition between governments and civil society, who have recognised the need for political action and greater support for the environment if the UN's Millennium Goals on poverty, water and sanitation, education, disease and child and maternal mortality are to be achieved.

More than 30 government agencies, conservation and development NGOs will be represented, many of whom have come together as part of an initiative, Environment for the Millennium Development Goals, coordinated by the Poverty-Environment Partnership* (PEP). BirdLife will be one of the organisations explaining how these agencies have worked with local communities to achieve benefits for human wellbeing and the environment.

The heads of state and government ministers attending the dinner will hear how the people of Mount Oku, Cameroon, have adopted sustainable community forest management, and seen their livelihoods become more secure, and their forests regenerate. They will learn that in Bolivia, forest conservation is being used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and the offset credits shared between industry and government, which will invest the proceeds in biodiversity conservation and local development, including establishing land tenure for the poor. And they will be told how in Komodo National Park, Indonesia, alternative fishing strategies have been developed which protect both the fishing economy and the coral reefs.

BirdLife, together with WWF, The Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International and Flora and Fauna International, will call upon the world's governments and the development community to acknowledge that alleviating poverty in a lasting manner is fundamentally linked to investing in environmental sustainability and accounting for the actual value of ecosystem services.

* The PEP is an organised donor group, established in September 2001, which seeks to improve the co-ordination of work on poverty and the environment. It has become an informal network of bilateral aid agencies, development banks, UN agencies and NGOs that aims to address key poverty-environment issues within the framework of international efforts to achieve the MDGs.