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LATIN AMERICA: Environment’s Poverty-Fighting Potential Largely Ignored

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 15 2010 (IPS) - The environment remains a second-tier matter in Latin America and the Caribbean despite being interwoven with persistent poverty and stalled economic development in the region, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme.

Dozens of experts from the region were convened by UNEP to contribute to the report “Environment Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean” (GEO- LAC3), following in the steps of reports presented in 2000 and 2003.

“Our intention is to provide ideas for human development with support for eradicating poverty, not to formulate an environmental policy, but rather to incorporate the environmental dimension in public policies,” Mara Murillo, of Mexico, UNEP regional deputy director, told IPS from Panama.

The environment “is seen as a given; it remains on the fringes of national accounts, and an effort at internalising it is required not only for valuing our ecosystems but for providing clean air, water and food for communities that are working to escape poverty,” said Murillo, who presented the GEO-LAC3 report Wednesday.

According to Venezuelan expert Antonio De Lisio, the environment “is still seen in this region with traditional criteria, based merely on conservation.”

The environment “isn’t generally linked with policies for overcoming poverty, which is the big issue in Latin America and the Caribbean,” De Lisio, director of the environmental studies centre at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS.

The GEO-LAC3, in considering the region’s modes of development, notes that the biggest challenge is poverty, given that 35 percent of the population (189 million people) is poor, and 14 percent extremely poor.

Historically, the region’s development model “has been largely based upon on the provision of food, raw materials and natural resources,” states the report, a model that “leads simultaneously to economic growth, social disintegration and environmental degradation, with a marked trend towards more income concentration and a less equitable share of the fruits of growth.”

In that context, the continued lax environmental regulation in exploiting natural resources in many countries is unable to deal with the emerging environmental tensions in the region, according to the report.

In De Lisio’s opinion, “the countries have done more to advertise their resources than to work towards a sustainable development model of their own that allows them to overcome poverty.”

“The result was a focus for a long time on the vocation for exporting petroleum from Venezuela, copper from Chile, or agricultural commodities from Paraguay,” he said.

The UNEP report backs that claim in that the region’s insertion into the international market has been through “exporting natural resources and goods with little or no processing… Primary goods account for 73 percent of exports.”

As it followed this path — often ignoring environmental variables — the region saw its population grow 51 percent in 40 years, especially in urban areas, where expansion was largely unplanned and unregulated. This also contributed to a 76-percent jump in water demand in just 15 years, and a four-fold increase in electricity demand in the last 35 years.

“Accelerated urbanisation without planning sets out one of the region’s urgent tasks, likewise the loss of forest — although the deforestation rate has begun to slow — and vulnerability to climate change,” said Murillo.

GEO-LAC3 notes that six of the world’s most megadiverse countries are found in Latin America and the Caribbean, but “this impressive biodiversity is being extinguished by increasing deforestation and the destruction of habitats, in which many species are endangered to one degree or another.”

The scientists contributing to the report warn about crossing the “point of no return” in consuming the planet’s resources, stressing that it is “crucial that all sectors of society understand the importance of this limit so as to decide when to backtrack in order to operate within safe limits.”

In laying out the possible scenarios, the GEO-LAC3 calls on decision-makers to “systematise how an integrated approach is applied to better respond to socioeconomic and environmental problems on regional and national sustainable development agendas.”

The experts involved in this research underscore, for example, that investment in environmental and social sustainability should be interpreted as essential for economic development.

However, they warn that some of the actions taken towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) established by the United Nations, as well as other environmental goals, “can be counterproductive.”

Ensuring environmental sustainability is the seventh of the eight MDGs, which the UN General Assembly established in 2000, with the target date of 2015, and 1990 as the baseline. One of the aims is to incorporate the principles of sustainable development into national policies and programmes.

One example that the GEO-LAC3 cites as counterproductive is “the increased large-scale production of biofuels, mainly for trade,” which competes for land and water resources, and therefore with food security and biodiversity protection.

The proposal to redirect the models for growth “should have in parallel the goals of fighting poverty and creating sustainable employment, utilising the local workforce, local innovation and efficient energy use, so that employment boosts our competence as a people and our capacity for conservation,” said De Lisio.

UNEP official Murillo, meanwhile, stressed that the new report can be put to practical use. “We hope that people utilise it, those who formulate policies, decision-makers, academics, non-governmental organisations and the common citizen, they can all do a lot with its standards for water consumption or efficient energy use,” she said.