WORLD population has doubled since 1961 but we produce more than 2陆 times as much food as we did then. You might well think we鈥檇 be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty, hunger and child mortality by 2015. But we aren鈥檛.
The reason, according to the MA, is that people in developing nations will not be able to escape poverty and hunger because their ecosystems are collapsing around them. In fact, if we continue with business as usual, any progress towards these goals may be short-lived.
鈥淚f you focus only on reducing poverty in the short term, you鈥檙e going to compromise your ability to reduce poverty and hunger in the long term, because that depends on ecosystem services,鈥� says Jane Lubchenco an ecologist at Oregon State University who participated in the MA. Reducing poverty at the expense of ecosystem damage is like eating our seed corn, she says.
Advertisement
Those most at risk are people living in dry regions such as large parts of India and Africa, says Robert Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank. These people, some of the poorest in the world, rely on local ecosystems services such as fresh water and food production that are already in bad shape.鈥滱lso, the rate of population growth in these areas is highest,鈥� he says.
Another problem is that changes in ecosystems such as deforestation or draining wetlands can affect the distribution of human pathogens. As things stand, half the urban population in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean already suffer from one or more diseases associated with inadequate water and sanitation. Similarly, deforestation is linked to increases in malaria because it leads to more swampy habitat where mosquito larvae develop.
And pressure on ecosystems is set to intensify. World GDP should quadruple by 2050. That鈥檚 good for poverty eradication, but means that people in developing nations in particular will be making greater demands on the environment. 鈥淎s the average person in the world becomes more wealthy they will demand more fish and more meat,鈥� says Watson.
鈥淎quaculture now accounts for around 30 per cent of total fish production鈥�
If we are to avoid environmental calamities like the collapse of the Atlantic cod stocks in the early 1990s as a result of overfishing, then the world must find less destructive ways of exploiting ecosystems.
