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	Safeguarding Earth crucial to development, human well-being by UN News & news agencies   22 April 2010   UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has stressed the need to respect and care for the Earth, noting that safeguarding the environment will impact efforts to achieve development goals and ensuring the health and well-being of its inhabitants.   Environmental sustainability – the wise management of the Earth’s bounty – is one of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that world leaders have pledged to try to achieve by 2015, along with other ambitious targets to halve poverty, hunger and disease.   Mr. Ban noted that protecting the Earth must be an integral component of the strategy to achieve the MDGs.   “Without a sustainable environmental base, we will have little hope of attaining our objectives for reducing poverty and hunger and improving health and human well-being,” he stated in a message on International Mother Earth Day, observed on 22 April.   The Secretary-General stressed that the Earth is under pressure. “We are making progressively unreasonable demands on her, and she is showing the strain.   “For all of human history we have depended on nature’s bounty for sustenance, well-being and development. Too often we have drawn on nature’s capital without putting back. We are now beginning to see the consequences of failing to safeguard our investment.”   Climate change and the depleted ozone layer are among the starkest examples, said Mr. Ban, noting that biological diversity is in rapid decline, freshwater and marine resources are increasingly polluted, and soils and fisheries are growing barren.   “The impact of our neglectful stewardship is being felt most by the world’s most vulnerable people,” who, if they are to break out of the poverty trap, need at the very minimum fertile land, clean water and adequate sanitation, he noted.   “I call on all governments, businesses and citizens of the world to give our Mother Earth the respect and care she deserves,” stated Mr. Ban.   Apr 2010   Bolivia"s fights to re-establish harmony with Mother Earth, by Naomi Klein.   The people"s summit to tackle climate change is a transformative response to the failure of the Copenhagen club. Bolivian President Evo Morales says to fight climate change "we need to recover the values of the indigenous people".   Yet wealthy countries seem to have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that, at its best, would raise average global temperatures 2C. "That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers," Morales told the thousands gathered in the national stadium, taking part in the World People"s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn"t have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.   Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalised key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia"s most pressing, existential crisis – the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities – Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.   That"s because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialised countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert climate disaster. They were politely told that the political will in the north just wasn"t there.   More than that, the United States made clear that it didn"t need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen accord.   When Morales invited "social movements and Mother Earth"s defenders … scientists, academics, lawyers and governments" to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against the experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a coalition behind the right to survive.   The Bolivian government got the ball rolling by proposing four big ideas: that nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from annihilation (a "universal declaration of Mother Earth rights"); that those who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements should face legal consequences (a "climate justice tribunal"); that poor countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating ("climate debt"); and that there should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views on these topics ("world people"s referendum on climate change").   Bolivia"s enthusiastic commitment to participatory democracy may well prove the summit"s most important contribution. That"s because, after the Copenhagen failure, the real culprit of the breakdown was democracy itself. The UN process, giving equal votes to 192 countries, was simply too unwieldy – better to find the solutions in small groups.   Even trusted environmental voices like James Lovelock fell prey: "I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war," he told the Guardian recently. "It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." But in reality, it is such small groupings – like the invitation-only club that pushed through the Copenhagen accord – that have caused us to lose ground, weakening already inadequate existing agreements. By contrast, the climate change policy brought to Copenhagen by Bolivia was drafted by social movements through a participatory process, and the end result was the most transformative and radical vision so far.   Bolivia"s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón says "the only effective way to stave off the life-threatening effects of climate change is to build a true consensus in favour of structural change in global consumption patterns with the participation of all the world’s peoples".   Mr Solón says that greenhouse gas emissions are the effects of a wasteful, unequal system of economics and consumption, adding that changes must be made to that model in order to reduce greenhouse gases in a way that was fair to all countries and peoples.   The notion of the rights of Mother Earth was important because climate change not only affected countries, but also had a profound impact on nature.   He stressed that the practices of industrialized countries had seriously affected people in developing countries and they should realize their responsibility. A fair climate deal should also take into account how to re-establish harmony with Mother Earth, restoring the balance for a sustainable life. Visit the related web page
	Unsafe water, the silent killer by IRIN News UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) South Africa   22 March 2010   Every 20 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease - 1.8 million children younger than five years each year. This alarming figure is from a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which says millions of tonnes of solid waste are being flushed into water systems every day, spreading disease.   "More than two billion tonnes of wastewater are being flushed into our fresh water and oceans every day, every year," Christian Nelleman, the lead author of the report, Sick Water?, told IRIN.   The wastewater, a cocktail of agricultural and industrial runoffs and sewage, was seeping into groundwater and polluting drinking sources, like wells, in low-lying areas where the bulk of the world''s population live.   Countries should not only invest in infrastructure to manage wastewater but also in ecosystems, for instance by replanting mangroves, which acted as natural filters in coastal areas, said Nelleman.   "What is also very alarming is the amount of phosphate and nitrogen that is lost as agricultural refuse - projections show that we can run out of phosphate very soon," he warned.   Nearly half the agricultural phosphate applied each season got washed away and ended up in rivers and oceans, where it contributed to triggering algae blooms that could damage ecosystems and fish stocks, Nelleman said. Wastewater treatment plants should be sophisticated enough to harvest the phosphates.   The report urged countries to draw up national and local strategies to cope with the wastewater production and invest in infrastructure to manage it.   Some facts from the report:   Around 90 percent of diarrhoea cases, which kill some 2.2 million people every year, are caused by unsafe drinking water and poor hygiene.   Over 50 percent of malnutrition cases globally are associated with diarrhoea or intestinal worm infections.   Over half the world''s hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from illnesses linked to contaminated water.   Almost 900 million people lack access to safe drinking water, and an estimated 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. South Asia (around 221 million) and sub-Saharan Africa (330 million) have the highest proportion of people living without basic sanitation.   Ninety percent of the wastewater discharged daily in developing countries is untreated. Eighty percent of all marine pollution originates on land – most of it wastewater - damaging coral reefs and fishing grounds.   People in developed countries generate five times more wastewater per person than those in developing countries, but treat over 90 percent of their wastewater, compared to only a few percent in developing countries.   Agriculture accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all water consumed, mainly for irrigation, but large amounts return to rivers as run-off; nearly half of all organic matter in wastewater comes from agriculture.   Industrial wastes, pesticides from agriculture, and tailings from mining also create serious health risks and threats to water resources, costing billions of dollars to monitor, much more to clean.   Use of bottled water is increasing, but it takes three litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water. In the USA alone an additional 17 million barrels of oil per year are used to make the plastic containers. Worldwide, 200 billion litres of bottled water are produced every year, creating an enormous problem of how to dispose of the used plastic bottles.   Wastewater generates methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2). It also generates nitrous oxide, which is 310 times more powerful than CO2.   It is estimated that in just a decade, wastewater-linked emissions of methane will rise by 25 percent and that of nitrous oxide by 50 percent. Increased flooding as a result of climate change can overwhelm ageing sewage infrastructure in cities and towns. Visit the related web page
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