Ecosystems and Poverty

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT – MARK YOUR CALENDARS!International EcoHealth Forum 2008“EcoHealth: Healthy Environments, Healthy People”

December 1st –5th, 2008, Mérida, MéxicoHuman health and development are dependent on healthy ecosystems. Yet, global ecosystems continue to deteriorate under increasing pressure from human development activities and patterns of consumption. Thus, the need is urgent to understand the linkages among public health, ecosystems, and social and economic conditions. The need to devise interventions to reconnect people and ecosystems to protect both is our goal.The quest for healthy ecosystems and sustainable human health requires innovative thinking across disciplines and professions. New research and policy partnerships, community participation and empowerment, and more effective and integrated mechanisms for communicating concerns in the public interest are needed.

Conference participants – researchers, policy makers and practitioners – will learn how project outcomes have been used by other policy makers, stakeholders and community representatives to effect improvements in ecosystem management, disease prevention and environmental protection. Experiences on research and practices, including methodological gaps, as well as opportunities for intervention and policy development will be presented. Renewing and establishing networks will further our capacities to continue promoting healthy ecosystems and, in turn, healthy people.Conference delegates are invited to plan now to contribute with paper, video and oral presentations to the development of new approaches and ideas in EcoHealth by being an active participant in IEF 2008.

AP
UN, Google, Cisco Team to Track Poverty
Friday November 2, 4:12 am ET
By Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer

UN Teams With Google and Cisco Systems to Track Global Efforts to Fight Poverty

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations teamed with technology giants Google Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. to launch a new Web site Thursday that will provide data and a bird’s eye view of global efforts to fight poverty and meet U.N. development goals by 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals, which world leaders approved at a U.N. summit in 2000, provide the latest statistics on health, education, malnutrition, women’s equality and other measures that contribute to poverty.

“They can see successes and celebrate those, and observe failures or shortfalls … and redouble their country’s commitment to pursue those efforts. So it’s very exciting for us,” said Michael Jones, chief technologist for Google Earth and Maps.

The goals include cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring universal primary school education, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, starting to reverse the HIV/AIDS pandemic and halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Thursday’s launch “crucial” because it makes all information on the U.N. goals available in one place for the first time “for all who seek it, with a few simple clicks of the mouse.”

Ban lamented that — midway between the goals’ adoption in 2000 and the target completion date of 2015 — almost 1 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; millions of children die every year before their fifth birthdays from causes associated with malnutrition; infectious diseases including AIDS and malaria take “their worst toll on countries that can least afford it” and millions of people live in slums.

“Clearly, we are facing a development emergency — and we need emergency action,” he said.

“For the first time in history, the world has at its disposal the means to cut poverty in half in the span of a generation,” the secretary-general said.

He said achieving the goals “is a matter of political will.

“There is no silver bullet, but the resources, knowledge and tools for achieving the goals do exist,” Ban said.

The new Web site is one of those tools because it will enable policymakers and development experts to learn from one another’s successes and setbacks, and it will increase public access and attention to the U.N. goals, Ban said.

At the end of his speech, Ban put his hand on the mouse of a laptop computer together with Jones, of Google; Carlos Dominguez, a Cisco Senior Vice President; and Kemal Dervis, U.N. Development Program Administrator.

The U.N. Development Program, which is facilitating the new Web site, said the budget for the project was $200,000, and it received $150,000 from corporate donors.

UNDP’s Dervis said the data on the MDG Monitor comes from a variety of U.N. agencies, the World Bank and governments around the world. But he noted that statistics are sometimes difficult to obtain and can conflict.

“We hope to gradually overcome these weaknesses and open the site to all organizations who gather statistics to offer their information,” he said.

http://www.mdgmonitor.org/