Initiatives: Environmental Sustainability

 

For many developing nations, the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Environmental Sustainability has identified a single environmental theme that could serve as an entry point for action on achieving Millennium Development Goal # 7 (MDG's >>).

The theme is forests. The management unit is the watershed, an area of land that drains freshwater from hillsides into ever-larger streams and, finally, into a single river that empties into the sea.

These extensive river basins stretch from the mountain ridge to the coastal reef and define a unit for action that has broad relevance to many of the MDGs. The results of good forest management in upland areas include healthy fisheries and coastal environments, both of which support local livelihood and national security.

Forests provide a suite of ecosystem services and goods, including those that directly generate revenue, such as timber, carbon sequestration and a venue for ecotourism activities, as well as ecological services such as mitigating floods, stabilizing soil, and hosting biodiversity. The presence of forests in the mountains protects the hillside soils, the inland water ways, and the coastal areas from pollution and erosion and subsequent sedimentation yielding healthy fisheries and reef environments. In turn, this dynamic supports the fishing and tourism industries, local livelihoods, and national security. One of the challenges in doing watershed management is getting the balance right between who pays and who benefits for this protection.

There are several reasons why the watershed is a useful and salient unit for environmental management. First, it has clear and immutable geographic boundaries, defined by any metric. Second, the watershed defines the dependencies that downstream communities have on upland environments.

For example, any damage that occurs to the environment in the upland areas of a watershed, especially to forests, can result in damage to the downstream and coastal areas through excessive sedimentation and chemical and biological pollution. Therefore, the watershed is relevant to the issue of who pays for environmental management and who benefits from it.

Clearly, the onus for conservation is on the upland communities, while much of the benefits from conservation are felt downstream. Finally, effective environmental management of watersheds yields collateral benefits to many sectors relevant to the MDGs: hunger, poverty, health, water and sanitation, and cooperation, to name a few.

There are many examples of integrated watershed management from around the world. The New York City government has just saved taxpayers approximately $4 billion by opting for watershed protection to provide clean and abundant drinking water to the city rather than building a costly water treatment plant. We see the potential for the Coalition government to adopt this approach into national policy and emerge as a world leaders in achieving MDG 7 on environmental sustainability.