Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 4 • Number 22 • 3rd December 2004

New Report Stresses Environment, Poverty Linkages

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On 1 December the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) released its latest report, entitled “World in Transition: Fighting Poverty through Environmental Policy”, to German ministers and the general public. The report says that successful environmental protection is a prerequisite for effective poverty eradication, suggesting that the prospects for developing countries “will only improve if more intensive mitigation and adaptation measures are adopted in response to ongoing environmental changes.” Concretely, it notes that industrialized countries must make contributions to overcoming the crisis by establishing more sustainable consumption and production practices domestically, supporting sustainable modernization in developing countries, and eliminating the gap between “wealthy countries’ rhetoric and their actual policies.” Developing countries, on the other hand, must practice good governance, improve the rights of the poor and take environmental issues seriously. To improve these linkages between poverty and the environment, the report suggests that the UN’s lack of policy coherence could be overcome by the establishment of a “Council for Global Development and Environment” as a lead UN agency coordinating the institutions working on development and the environment. As well, funds could be raised by diverting expenditure from the OECD countries’ agricultural subsidies and environmentally harmful subsidies worldwide, increasing official development assistance and by public-private partnerships.

The report can be accessed here.

ICTSD Reporting; “Report ‘Fighting Poverty through Environmental Policy’: Effective Environmental Policies are Key to Global Poverty Reduction,” WBGU Press Release, 1 December 2004.