New Report submitted to the Federal Government: "Effective Environmental Policies are Key to Global Poverty Reduction"

In their report, the scientists stress that successful environmental protection is a prerequisite for effective poverty eradication. The poor countries' development prospects will only improve if more intensive mitigation and adaptation measures are adopted in response to ongoing environmental changes. The industrialized countries must make their contribution to help overcome this crisis. In the WBGU's view, the linkages between environmental protection and poverty reduction must be strengthened and the two areas must be embedded more effectively in national and international policies as cross-cutting tasks. This approach would benefit every country.

Human intervention in the natural environment is already jeopardizing the livelihood of the poor throughout the world. Unless counter-measures are adopted, environmental changes will have an even more life-threatening impact in the future. Absolute poverty means not only a lack of income but also, in most cases, an increased risk of starvation and disease and a lack of access to education. Even now, 1.1 billion people subsist on less than one US dollar a day; the same number of people have no access to safe drinking water, and around 840 million people are malnourished. And every year, around 1.6 million people die from the effects of indoor air pollution.

Breathing life into Global Partnership

Now more than ever, responsible partnership between industrialized and developing countries is essential in order to protect vital natural resources and combat poverty. From the WBGU's perspective, this means that the industrialized countries must establish sustainable consumption and production patterns at home while supporting viable modernization processes in developing countries. The present gap between the wealthy countries' rhetoric and their actual policies is undermining the developing countries' trust and confidence. At the same time, developing country governments have a responsibility to practise good governance, improve the rights of the poor, and take seriously the environmental dimension of sustainability.

UN reform: Giving development and environmental problems equal priority with security issues

The UN is a cumbersome organization which must improve its capability for global governance and become the backbone of a global environmental and development partnership. This is the only way to reduce the much-lamented lack of policy coordination (coherence) and give greater weight to sustainability goals within the international community. As a long-term vision, the WBGU recommends the establishment of a "Council for Global Development and Environment" as a lead agency in the UN system. Its role would be to coordinate the institutions working on development and environment, including the international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, and focus their activities towards the guiding vision of sustainability. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) would be subsumed into this new body. Since an amendment to the UN Charter would be necessary to establish this new Council, this reform project can only be achieved over the long term. A further key reform step is the rapid upgrading of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) into a UN specialized agency.

Driving forward local implementation

The WBGU emphasises that international agreements can only be implemented successfully if the role of national and local players as the driving force in this process is understood and recognized. In most cases, the transition from the adoption of global action programmes to their practical implementation at local level continues to be unsatisfactory. Quantitative targets for international conventions should therefore be agreed, indicators to monitor the measures be drafted and coordination between donors be improved.

Securing the funding

The implementation of internationally agreed targets on poverty and environment is affordable. According to the WBGU, the additional resources needed for this purpose run in the low hundreds of billions of US dollars annually. This matches the OECD countries' annual spending on agricultural subsidies, which total around US dollars 350 billion. The costs of protecting the climate and biodiversity alsofall within this range. Then there are the additional costs of adaptation to, and compensation for, climate damage. There are various ways of generating the extra funding required. For example, funds could be diverted away from current expenditure: abolishing environmentally harmful subsidies is one option here. Dismantling trade barriers, which impede the poor countries' access to the industrialized countries' markets, would trigger a far higher flow of resources into the developing countries. An increase in official development assistance (ODA) is also required, especially for the least developed countries. And finally, funds can also be generated through public-private partnerships, i.e. alliances between official development assistance, civil society and the private sector. Other instruments include charging for the use of global common resources, such as international airspace or the oceans. For example, an EU-wide charge on the consumption of aviation fuel would generate as much as € 21 billion in revenue annually.

Using forthcoming political summits for a change in course

The forthcoming G8 Summit in July 2005 will focus on poverty reduction and climate protection. In this context, the WBGU welcomes the British Government's announcement that it plans to cancel more of the developing countries' debt. The German Federal Government should follow suit, since the high debt burden facing many poor countries is an impediment to their sustainable development. The Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, which links debt relief to specific conditions, should be overhauled and extended to heavily indebted middle-income countries. The High-Level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly scheduled for September 2005 – which will follow up on the Millennium Development Goals adopted by 150 heads of state and government in 2000 and review progress on the outcomes of recent world conferences – also offers the opportunity to develop further international environmental and poverty reduction policies.

Background: Systems analysis as basis

The recommendations for action contained in this report are based on a detailed analysis of the systemic links between poverty (income poverty, disease, malnutrition, lack of education, as well as social stability and social capital) and environmental changes (climate change, lack of water resources and water pollution, soil degradation, loss of biological diversity, as well as air pollution). The manifestations of and interactions between poverty and environmental problems are investigated, and potential solutions at political level are derived. When developing strategies for implementation, the WBGU takes the view that coherence between action on poverty and environmental policies is essential. In development cooperation, for example, climate policy should not be restricted to adaptation measures but should also include emissions prevention. At the same time, climate-oriented technology transfer should take greater Page 4 of 4 account of the interests of the poor. This is the only way to ensure positive system feedback.