Real Millennium Development Goals for environmentalists
It’s an acknowledged secret among ecologists and environmentalists that there’s been a lack of substantial progress toward sustainable development since at least the Earth Summit. That isn’t to minimize the many hours of work that some have put it in to move the world more that direction, nor the very real victories that have been won on some fronts, but is just a recognition that overall there hasn’t been much movement. Partially, it’s just because true sustainable development is such a very difficult task. Much of the geopolitics of the world is driven by economic valuation within the market economy, to which most ecosystem services are mere externalities. The state of anarchy at an international level doesn’t help either, as it makes issues like global warming almost intractable. However, recently these issues (and the many others like them) have come to seem almost like excuses that we environmentalists make, to cover up our ability to set tangible, achievable goals.
This is most glaringly obvious with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were originated by the UN and a broad consortium of other IGOs and NGOs, in an attempt to define what kind of development is needed in the Third World. Most MDGs are rather broad (e.g., “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger”), but policymakers agreed to quite specific indicators of progress (e.g. “Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger [as defined by the UN]”). These specific indicators have been fairly effective at mobilizing action at a national and international level, and have at least given policymakers something tangible to aim for. In contrast, the indicator for the environmental MDG (“Ensure environmental sustainability”) is scandalously vague: “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources”. I can understand why the ecologists who drafted this indicator used broad language, for the gap between current development patterns and sustainable development patterns is indeed broad (and anyway, broad language is always politically easier to get agreement on). Still, that’s no excuse – when you stop to think about it, all the disciplines involved in the formation of the MDGs (e.g., public health) faced similarly huge challenges, but managed to come up with some more specific indicators. And our broadness in the formation of the environmental indicators for the MDGs has made them, in my opinion, the least useful and policy-relevant of all the indicators.
What are some specific indicators that ecologists could all agree on? Well, for starters, we could agree on some quantitative targets for the rate of loss of natural land cover in different biomes or ecoregions. For example, a quantitative goal for the rate of loss of tropical forest would be quite useful, for we know that that rate is (imperfectly) related to biodiversity loss. We might also make it a goal to make sure all countries protect at least 10% of their area in conservation reserves. If any ecologists reading this disagree with these specific indicators, that’s fine- just propose some alternative indicators, subject to three rules:
1.) Indicators must be ambitious but achievable in a decade or two (I realize judging what is achievable is a bit of an art)
2.) Indicators must be quantitative, and the data must exist to measure them (otherwise they’re not really indicative!).
3.) Indicators must be easily explainable to the average lay person in less than 5 sentences.
