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UN Millennium Development Goals
The objective of the Millennium Declaration of
2000 is to promote a comprehensive approach
and a coordinated strategy, tackling many
problems simultaneously across a broad front.
The declaration calls for halving poverty by the
year 2015, through reducing by half the number
of people who lived on less than one dollar a
day in 1990. This involves finding solutions to
hunger, malnutrition and diseases, promoting
gender equality and empowerment of women,
guaranteeing a basic education for everyone,
and supporting the Agenda 21 principles of
sustainable development. Direct support from
the richer countries, in the form of aid, trade,
debt relief and investment is to be provided to
assist the initiatives of developing countries.
The solutions form the eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).
• Goal 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Goal 2 Achieve universal primary education
• Goal 3 Promote gender equality and
empower woman
• Goal 4 Reduce child mortality
• Goal 5 Improve maternal health
• Goal 6 Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and
other diseases
• Goal 7 Ensure environmental sustainability
• Goal 8 Develop a global partnership for
development.
MDG 7 Environmental Sustainability
This chapter tracks Goal 7 on Environmental
Sustainability (Table 4.1), with profiles of the
eight countries of the Zambezi River Basin.
Overview
All Zambezi Basin states show progress on
some aspects of all of the four Targets for
environmental sustainability, although some
of the indicators are not prioritized or well-
populated. Existing information is often dated
and incomplete, and may be obtained from
secondary sources, although some data exists
for all Basin states for most indicators. The data
is generally accessible at national level rather
than for specific areas, such as those within the
Zambezi River Basin. Therefore of necessity the
data that follows is national rather than specific
to that portion of the country within the Basin.
Target 7A – Reverse the loss of
environmental resources
The most immediate challenge for the Zambezi
basin states out of the five indicators for Target
7A is deforestation, and this is likely to continue
to be a challenge until economically viable
alternatives to fuelwood are in general use. That
is, until the economies improve and acceptable
alternatives are easily accessible and affordable.
There is a growing body of evidence that the
rate and extent of deforestation contribute to
climate change in the Basin (SARDC and HBS
2010). The major causes of deforestation in
the Basin are agricultural expansion, fuelwood
collection, harvesting of non-timber forest
products, commercial harvesting of natural/
indigenous timber species and forest fires. These
are some of the issues that must be addressed
in order to stem the destruction of forests and
meet the MDG Target 7A of reducing the loss
of environmental resources. Figure 4.1 shows
the reduction in forest reserves by country in
hectares over a 20-year period from 1990.
With regard to the other indicators, the extent
of carbon emissions is not well documented
and is not considered a significant factor in
the Zambezi Basin. The consumption of ozone
depleting substances has not been well studied
in the Basin. Some data on the proportion of
freshwater fish stock has been assembled by
FAO for Lake Malawi/Nyasa/Niassa and Lake
Kariba, although not yet for Cahora Bassa, and
there is no general agreement on the definition
of “safe biological limits” for those water bodies.
Proportion of total water resources is based
on estimates drawn from modelling and is
dated, but significant work on this subject has
been applied in the publication by Hirji
et al.
(2002) entitled Defining and Mainstreaming
Table 4.1. MDG 7 Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Source: UNEP 2008.
Targets
Target 7A Integrate the principles of sustainable
development into the country policies
and programmes and reverse the loss of
environmental resources
Target 7B Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving by
2010 a significant reduction in the area of loss
Target 7C Halve by 2015, the proportion of
people without sustainable access to safe
drinking water and basic sanitation
Target 7D By 2020 to have achieved a
significant improvement in the lives of at least
100 million slum dwellers
Indicators
7.1 Proportion of land area covered by forest
7.2 Carbon emissions total, per capita and per $1 GDP (ppp)
7.3 Consumption of ozone depletion substances
7.4 Proportion of fish stock within safe biological limits
7.5 Proportion of total water resources
7.6 Proportion of terrestrial and marine areas protected
7.7 Proportion of species threatened with extinction
7.8 Proportion of population using an improved water source
7.9 Proportion of population using an improved sanitation facility
7.10 Proportion of urban population living in slums
The Millennium
Development Goals