Millennium Development Goals
What Are the Millennium Development Goals?
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Seeks to:
1) integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs, reversing the loss of environmental resources;
2) reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss;
3) halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation;
4) By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Presently, forests are disappearing at the rate of 200sq. km a day. That’s equivalent to losing forest cover the size of a soccer pitch every 2 seconds, or the size of Panama every year.
This deforestation is displacing indigenous peoples from their native homes and uprooting their livelihoods.
Over 2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation facilities and one billion lack access to drinkable water. this leads to malnutrition, diarrhea and high mortality rates.
Around 2 million children die every year from preventable infections spread by dirty water or improper sanitation facilities.
Sources:
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/goals.html
http://www.undp.org/mdg/goal7.shtml