Posted on 12/26/2004 10:07:48 PM PST by hedgetrimmer
The World Bank on Tuesday chastised rich countries for not giving enough to fund global environmental protection and warned that overall progress in meeting global environmental targets was "alarmingly slow."
In an annual report entitled "Environment Matters," the World Bank said aid for the environment averaged about $2 billion a year over the past decade, far less than well-off societies agreed during a major environment summit in Brazil in 1992.
The report estimated that protecting the environment in developing countries amounted to about $2.50 per person a year in rich countries, less than the current price for a gallon of gasoline in most industrialized nations.
"If the war on environmental degradation is to be won, we need a major turnaround," James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank urged in the report.
He said rich countries should set an example by adopting environmentally friendly production and consumption practices.
"Rich countries' larger contribution to environmental damage means they must shoulder greater respon-sibility for fixing the problem," he said.
And in poorer countries, governments should improve policies on water, energy, transport and trade to help reduce consumption of scarce natural resources, Wolfensohn added.
"Beyond this, environmental concerns must be integrated more fully into development policymaking," he said.
World Bank's top environment official, Ian Johnson, said in the report that it was vital that global efforts on the environment be targeted and coordinated to enhance growth and reduce poverty.
"Clearly the prudent way forward must be based on promoting a development path that integrates economic growth with environmental responsibility and social equity," said Johnson, vice president of the environ-mental and social sustainable development division at the bank.
The report urged governments to overcome significant political, gover-nance and institutional constraints to reverse harmful environmental trends.
FYI
Somebody or something other than a balanced set of books, is keeping banks "in business."
Translating Greenspeak, the World Bank means we must sacrifice our standard of living so the Third World won't suffer from misplaced envy.
The World Bank always operates in the dialectic of rich vs poor. There's never talk that the world must allow free enterprise to flourish, only discussion about ways Americans can be relieved of their money.
Exactly. We must always do more. What's NEVER discussed is how the world can do its share.
It's good to know that we have bankers on hand to keep us abreast of environmental problems!
Do the bankers get a commission on money spent on the environment like the UN Oil for Food program paid out?
Most of the time poor countries are far worse on protecting the environment than the rich countries.
I read that the USSR's car, the Trabant, a tiny piece of junk, put out 300 times more pollution than a large powerful West German Mercedes sedan.
If they really want to protect the environment then develop the land.
You are mixing up rich and poor with free countries and communist countries.
Free people who have their right to own property protected will take care of their property. Communists who have no protections from their government for their property can't get too attached or care for it too well because it might get taken away.
Freedom vs communism 101.
The WTO is the same way. They are always pontificating on the idea that rich countries owe it to the poor countries to develop their trade for them.
"World Bank means we must sacrifice our standard of living so the Third World won't suffer from misplaced envy."
ROTFLMAO!
The Way Ahead
Our Planet 9.1
June 1997
Now the rich must adjust
SHRIDATH RAMPHAL
says it is the turn of affluent countries to embrace
the discipline of structural adjustment if the crisis
over consumption and resources is to be addressed
There is little cause for pride on the world's score-card five years after Rio - and still less for complacency. It is worthy neither of the process of the Earth Summit itself, nor of its promises, qualified as they were. Five years on, humanity barely earns an 'E' for effort. Astonishing, when it is all about survival. Yet we still claim to be Homo sapiens.
In the review of progress now being undertaken by the international community, there is a case for weighing up developments on all the separate issues that together make up the environmental problem facing the world - and for being concerned with the detail. But there is also a danger that, engrossed in the detail, we may miss the larger picture, and that in focusing on a number of issues, however important, we might lose sight of the big one.
The big issue posed by the challenge of environment is that of resources versus consumption. The crux of sustainable development is to order global development in such a way that its impact on the Earth's resources does not imperil the life chances of those who will follow us. We who live now do not have freehold rights to the Earth's ecological capital: we are only tenants with temporary custody and the moral obligation to act as responsible trustees. We say this almost rhetorically; we do not live by its precepts.
Resources, and how we use them, are at the heart of most of our environmental problems. There are questions about the world's continuing capacity to produce the food - grain, fish, meat - needed for an expanding population. There has been worry that water scarcities could become dangerously acute. There are signs that the modern world's love affair with the motor vehicle is coming under strain. Concern has been expressed about land, energy, raw materials, wastes, pollution.
Environmental disquiet has undoubtedly spurred action on all these - and other - fronts. But the push for growth, the drive to increase the gross domestic product, goes inexorably on, as if it had no link to all these other issues. It is assumed without question that people in even the most affluent countries must have a higher standard of material well-being year after year - and that this process of enrichment must go on without interruption, without end.
The impulse to achieve economic growth is natural and necessary in poorer countries. Living standards are, on average, much lower, and many hundreds of millions of their people are still to be lifted out of the most abject poverty and deprivation. The dazzling performance of some developing nations, primarily the 'Asian Tigers', has tended to obscure the stubborn persistence of poverty. The success of these countries notwithstanding, the poor are not only still with us, but now with us in larger numbers than ever.
Globalization may have transformed the world economy in many respects but there are parts it has not reached, people it has not touched, and others it has affected not to enrich, but to impoverish. As many as 1.6 billion people - more than a fourth of the world population - are poorer than they were 15 years ago, says the United Nations Development Programme. In 19 countries, people are poorer than they were 35 years ago. Not for them the easy assumption that living standards would continue to improve from year to year; the hard reality has been that their incomes, meagre as they are, have gone on falling, year after year.
Roughly three-quarters of the world's people live in developing countries - but, because they are poor, they account for only a quarter of the world's consumption. Their living standards urgently demand to be raised, not least so that their basic needs of food, health, education and shelter may not remain unfulfilled. They have as much right to the use of the world's resources as any other of the world's people. But if total world consumption cannot be increased without running down the world's ecological capital, poor countries can only have a larger slice of the pie if rich countries are ready to countenance a different distribution - and adjust to a smaller share for themselves.
Need to adjust
For over two decades the world's financial institutions - and the industrial nations that control them - have prescribed structural adjustment to poor countries, who have had little choice but to take this medicine to recover their economic health. Now the world's ecological health - and therefore the interests of all humankind - requires a similar prescription for the rich. They need to undertake adjustment - to a lower level of consumption, to a more equitable distribution of resources, to an acceptance that economic growth cannot be boundless. How industrial countries respond to the need for adjustment on their part is becoming increasingly vital to our common future on planet Earth. That is how the big issue of resources versus consumption now confronts us.
So far there is no evidence that this issue is being faced seriously. Some developments suggest that people in industrial societies are becoming aware that growth cannot continue unchecked, at least in some fields. There is, for instance, enlarging resistance to the encroachments of motor vehicles; protests against new motorways are no longer rare, nor are demands for car-free zones. But these local expressions of civic impatience do not add up to a general acknowledgement that environmental dangers require affluent countries to embrace the discipline of adjustment.
Crucial impact
So far in the global discussion of our environmental predicament, the tendency has been to put the focus on human numbers, on population growth, as the crucial source of environmental stress. Population is undoubtedly part of the picture, and the developing world, where the growth in numbers is predominantly taking place, must hold its growth down. But it is through consumption that people impact on the environment, and because people in industrial countries consume much more per head, the one-quarter of the world population living in them presses far more heavily on the environment than the poorer three-quarters who live in the developing world.
Five years after Rio, we need a wider acceptance that how much we consume - and therefore how aggressively, and often unthinkingly, we go for growth - is critical to our common future on this planet.
Sir Shridath Ramphal, for 15 years Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, is Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance, and author of Our Country, The Planet, written for the Earth Summit.
Contents |
and the rich say that the world bank can kiss their caviar covered backsides.
Here is what we are doing in the Amazon-- most US taxpayers don't know they are funding all the organizations giving money away in this excerpt:
The partnership between the Brazilian Government, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the World Bank, and the international community has been the basis for the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, which seeks to set aside 12 percent of the Amazon for conservation.
The Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rainforests, funded by the Brazilian government and the G7 countries, has provided US$420 million in the past decade for alternatives to deforestation. Where these programs have been implemented, little deforestation has occurred.
The World Bank, through a recently approved US$505 million loan, is supporting the inclusion of environmental issues and concerns across Brazil's government ministries.
The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism allows for the trade of carbon credits for reforestation. This mechanism could help establish a system to pay for the maintenance of standing forests and support policies that comprehend the Amazon's global value.
I believe the United States is a member of the G8:
Britain wants the world to write off the debts of the poorest countries, sponsor research for new malaria and AIDS vaccines and complete global trade talks during its presidency of the G8 rich nations club next year.
With London also set to chair European Union meetings in the second half of 2005, finance minister Gordon Brown said in a speech that next year would be a "make or break year for development" as he set out Britain's three main targets for the two presidencies.
"We must, for the sake of the world's poorest not squander, but must seize, an opportunity to make a breakthrough on debt relief and development, on tackling disease and completing the Doha development round," Brown said, according to the text of his speech.
Brown said he would press Washington next week to support both multilateral debt relief and his plan to double aid to the poorest countries, in the hope of building an international consensus by February when ministers meet in London.
He also called on all developed nations to declare a timetable for raising aid spending to 0.7 percent of gross domestic product, as Britain has pledged to do by 2013.
Aid agencies welcomed the Chancellor of the Exchequer's promise to put development issues at the forefront next year but said words needed to be backed by action.
"He must keep up the pressure on finance ministers globally, particularly in the U.S., to put global poverty at the top of their agenda," said Charles Bain, director of CAFOD.
Humanitarian agency Oxfam said on Monday that rich countries' failure to meet promises first made five years ago will result in 45 million children dying in the next decade.
Cafod director Chris Bain said: "The gap between the rich and poor is widening and at least 300 million Africans live on less than 50 pence a day. The cost of tackling poverty would not hurt us.
"The £30bn spent on Christmas shopping in the UK could halve global poverty. Millions of lives depend on the world’s richest countries coming up with the money and changing the way they trade.
Mr Bain added: "2005 offers our generation the last best chance to end poverty. The G8, led by Britain next year, must seize the prize."
Although world leaders promised $100bn in debt relief in 1999 at the G8 Summit in Cologne, only $31bn has been delivered to date.
Figures show that over a half of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (or HIPCs) spend 15 per cent of their government revenue on debt servicing.
***
As a member of the G8 the US will be expected to chip in the largest percentage of the $100 billion dollar wealth transfer next year.
Bite me, commies!
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