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	Rural Women lag behind on Millenium Development Goals by World Farmers Organisation   Governments have missed an important opportunity to support rural women. The failure of the negotiations at the Commission on the Status of Women to reach an outcome is a disappointing signal sent to women farmers around the world about their governments’ commitment to address gender inequalities.   Rural women globally face persistent gaps in access to resources, knowledge and services, underpinned by persistent inequalities in rights. By all measures, despite repeated public commitments to gender equality, governments have by and large failed to meet even the most fundamental targets.   Women lag behind on every Millennium Development Goal, except for the fourth goal of reducing the mortality of children under 5. Women, about 79% of women in developing countries consider agriculture as their primary source of livelihood. Yet, because of cultural attitudes, discrimination and a lack of recognition for their role in food production, women have a reduced access to productive resources.   In sub-Saharan Africa, only 15% of landholders are women and they receive less than 10% of credit and 7% of extension services. As a result, their productivity lags behind, negatively affecting their livelihoods and that of their families.   Lack of access to services and infrastructures takes away time from education and other opportunities and this gap in access disproportionately affects women and girls. According to FAO, in Malawi, for example, women spend over eight times as much time fetching wood and water per week than men, while in rural areas of Guinea, for example, women spend more than twice more than men on the same tasks.   Governments cannot afford to miss the next opportunity to set in motion concrete actions and programmes to truly address rural women’s needs. The outcomes of Rio+20 conference in June should make explicit the primary importance of gender equality and contain specific commitments to support women’s access to resources, knowledge, services, education, training and markets.   Robert Carlson, President of World Farmers said “The failure to address the persistent inequalities that undermine rural women’s status and well-being should be the priority area of focus for all governments. We will not achieve sustainable development if we do not achieve gender equality.” Visit the related web page
	Goals for Rio: A Path to Sustainability by Earth Institute at Columbia University   June 2012   World leaders and thousands of citizens representing public and private sectors will convene in Rio de Janeiro next week for Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The goal: to exchange ideas for solving some of the world’s most pressing problems; and, to create a roadmap for the future.   The agenda is broad: economic development, environmental sustainability, social inclusion. The participants in the formal talks June 20-22 are hoping to produce a document outlining how the world should move ahead to achieve these things. That could include a set of “sustainable development” goals and commitments – ways to help people climb out of extreme poverty, and to keep our growing population from consuming the planet’s natural resources at an unsustainable rate.   Perhaps even more important will be all the interactions going on around the formal talks – meetings of business and civil society groups, non-governmental organizations, local government representatives and others. They will exchange ideas and policies, make their own commitments to move ahead, and forge new and productive partnerships.   In an article published in The Lancet, Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs outlined his own ideas for sustainable development goals – the SDGs. He writes about how these goals can build on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s set of targets that aim to reduce extreme poverty and boost social well-being in many other ways by 2015.   “The SDGs are an important idea, and could help finally to move the world to a sustainable trajectory. The detailed content of the SDGs, if indeed they do emerge in upcoming diplomatic processes, is very much up for discussion and debate,” Sachs writes. “Their content, I believe, should focus on two considerations: global priorities that need active worldwide public participation, political focus, and quantitative measurement; and lessons from the MDGs, especially the reasons for their successes, and corrections of some of their most important shortcomings.”   He continues: “The SDGs should … pose goals and challenges for all countries—not what the rich should do for the poor, but what all countries together should do for the global wellbeing of this generation and those to come.”   Here’s a quick look at the four goals Sachs proposes in the Lancet article:   SDG 1: by 2030, if not earlier, all the world’s people will have access to safe and sustainable water and sanitation, adequate nutrition, primary health services, and basic infrastructure, including electricity, roads, and connectivity to the global information network.   SDG 2: from 2015 to 2030, all nations will adopt economic strategies that increasingly build on sustainable best practice technologies, appropriate market incentives, and individual responsibility. The world will move together towards low-carbon energy systems, sustainable food systems, sustainable urban areas (including resilience in the face of growing hazards), and stabilisation of the world’s population through the voluntary fertility choices of families supported by health services and education. Countries will adopt a pace of change during these 15 years, individually and with global cooperation, that will enable humanity to avoid the most dangerous planetary thresholds. The world community will help low-income countries to bear the additional costs that they might entail in adoption of sustainable systems for energy, agriculture, and other sectors.   SDG 3: every country will promote the wellbeing and capabilities of all their citizens, enabling all citizens to reach their potential, irrespective of class, gender, ethnic origin, religion, or race. Every country will monitor the wellbeing of its citizenry with improved measurements and reporting of life satisfaction. Special attention will be given to early childhood, youth, and elderly people, addressing the vulnerabilities and needs of each age cohort.   SDG 4: governments at all levels will cooperate to promote sustainable development worldwide. This target includes a commitment to the rule of law, human rights, transparency, participation, inclusion, and sound economic institutions that support the private, public, and civil-society sectors in a productive and balanced manner. Power is held in trust to the people, not as a privilege of the state.   For Rio+20, a Call to Preserve Biodiversity   An estimated 9 million species of living things inhabit the Earth — plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms such as algae and bacteria. But those species are disappearing at an alarming rate, and this loss of biodiversity appears to be a major driver of environmental changes that can affect the biological and chemical processes that humans rely on, according to a new paper in the journal Nature.   “No one can agree on what exactly will happen when an ecosystem loses a species, but most of us agree that it’s not going to be good. And we agree that if ecosystems lose most of their species, it will be a disaster,” said Shahid Naeem of Columbia University, who was one of 17 scientists from around the world who worked on the paper, a review of 20 years of ecological research published this week.   The 7 billion people living on the planet now depend on those ecosystems, and the diverse array of life that comprise them, for our own existence: for food, water, fertile soil, fuel, clean air and protection from pests and disease. The ways that those organisms absorb, utilize and recycle nutrients also play a key role in our climate.   “There is now unequivocal evidence that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients,” the authors write in the paper, “Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity.”   The paper comes 20 years after the first earth summit in Rio de Janeiro, where a majority of the world’s nations recognized that human activity was “dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate,” the authors note. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio resulted in 193 nations supporting the Convention on Biological Diversity’s goals of biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources.   The summit spurred a flood of research into ecosystems and biodiversity. From that work, the authors say, strong scientific evidence has emerged showing that loss of the world’s biological diversity reduces the productivity and sustainability of natural ecosystems.   “Twenty years and a thousand studies later, what the world thought was true in Rio in 1992 has finally been proven: Biodiversity underpins our ability to achieve sustainable development,” said Naeem, who is chairman of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia and director of science for the Earth institute’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation.   In just two weeks, representatives from national governments, civil society groups, businesses and other organizations from around the world will gather in Rio again, for Rio+20, to try to hammer out new goals for economic development, the eradication of extreme poverty and environmental protection. The Nature paper’s authors say biodiversity should be high up on the agenda.   “Much as the consensus statements by doctors led to public warnings that tobacco use is harmful to your health, this [paper] is a consensus statement by experts who agree that loss of Earth’s wild species will be harmful to the world’s ecosystems and may harm society by reducing ecosystem services that are essential to human health and prosperity,” said, Bradley Cardinale, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who led the review.   “We need to take biodiversity loss far more seriously – from individuals to international governing bodies – and take greater action to prevent further losses of species,” said Cardinale.   Human actions — such as deforestation, overfishing, industrial-scale agriculture and urban development — are dismantling Earth’s natural ecosystems, resulting in species extinctions at rates several orders of magnitude faster than observed in the fossil record.   Even so, there’s still time – if the nations of the world make biodiversity preservation an international priority – to conserve much of the remaining variety of life and to restore much of what’s been lost, according to Cardinale and his colleagues.   * The Science and Development Network is also covering Rio+20 see: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-and-innovation-policy/science-at-rio-20/ Visit the related web page
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