Addressing Environmental Health Issues

Pollution, poverty and population growth are a powerful triad, linked through a complex web of cause and effect. At the local and global levels, population growth and/or high rates of consumption can generate pollution and degrade natural resources, damaging environmental health.

Environmental health is very much connected to human health and development. Clean water and access to basic sanitation are crucial. Exposure to lead has long been known to compromise children’s educational potential. More recently, scientists suspect that chemicals like dioxin could be seriously and systematically undermining human reproductive processes.

Environmental stewardship can save women’s lives by protecting their health and by preserving the resources to guarantee us all a sustainable future.

The situation

n     More than 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, while half of humanity lacks adequate sanitation. These conditions cause an estimated 80 percent of all diseases in the developing world. The annual death toll exceeds 5 million, 10 times the number killed in wars, on average, each year.¹

n     Global biodiversity—the millions of animal and plant types, the genes they contain and the ecosystems of which they are a part—is endangered worldwide. Two-thirds of all species may disappear by the end of the 21^st century.²

n     Healthy ecosystems like forests, coral reefs and wetlands are key to preventing floods and storm surges, purifying water, providing food, abating erosion and cleaning the air. But global forest cover has been reduced by up to 50 percent since pre-agricultural times.³

n     More than half the world’s coral reefs are severely threatened.⁴ Two-thirds of fish stocks are being harvested at or beyond capacity.⁵

n     Habitat loss and over-exploitation of resources compromise the production of timber, food, fiber, medicines, minerals and energy. They also diminish nature’s ability to provide key “services” such as clearing air and water of our pollution, preventing erosion and protecting communities from flooding.

n     Demand in wealthy countries for luxury or cash crops induces developing countries to divert the best land and wage labor away from crops for domestic consumption. Small farmers, many of them women, must still scratch out a living on increasingly marginal land.

n     Women in rural areas must walk further and further to gather firewood and water for cooking and washing when marginal land is taken over for farms or housing, trees are cut down and rainwater runs off instead of replenishing wells.

n     Scientists now say persistent organic pollutants (POPS)) such as DDT, chlordane, PCPs and dioxin, are highly toxic. They can cause cancer, allergies and hypersensitivity, damage to the nervous system, reproductive disorders, and disruption of the immune system.

n     Some POPs are also endocrine disrupters, which alter hormone systems to damage reproductive and immune systems of exposed individuals as well as their offspring. They can also hinder normal child development.

Developments

n     The World Water Forum’s Ministerial Conference in March 2000 established a set of realistic targets to promote universal access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

n     The Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted by nations of the world in 1992, establishes a global framework for sustainable use and conservation of natural resources.

n     The Framework Convention on Global Climate Change (FCCC), adopted by nations of the world in 1992, and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol, chart a course for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases worldwide.

n     Recent studies have shown that educating poor rural women in sanitation, resource conservation and safe use of pesticides leads to healthier families, increased production and rising farm income, as well as lower levels of pesticide runoff and soil erosion.⁵

n     Population is now growing eight times faster than technology is expanding arable land.³

n     In December 2000, 122 countries finalized a binding treaty that will require governments to minimize and eliminate some of the most dangerous persistent organic pollutants.

Examples

n     Women in the Philippine island village of Bantique, impoverished by local overfishing, organized in 1992 to culture fish, prawns and oysters, fatten crabs and grow vegetables and fruit for sale. Government help added electricity and school aid, and many of the women now earn more than their husbands.⁷

n     In Nepal, a project of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) leases blocks of degraded forest land to groups of poor households, many headed by women. They in turn improve the terracing and plant bamboo, fruit trees and other commercial crops while also switching to stoves that cut their fuel use by 30 percent.⁷

n     In Rwanda, where women are legally prohibited from inheriting land, the average smallholder was farming 1.2 hectares in 1984. With four sons on average per family, each inheriting equally, the size of the average landholding is now 0.3 hectares, too small to feed a family.⁸

n     A family life and sex education project for teenagers in Jocotepec, Mexico, added a focus on the effects of pollution in nearby Lake Chapala, educating 9,000 adolescents on recycling, tree planting and lake cleanup. Similar projects formed elsewhere as a result, creating the Mexico Population and Environment Network.⁸

1. Annan, Kofi, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21^st Century, United Nations, 2000, p. 60

2. Raven, Peter, “Plants in Peril: What Should We Do?”  Speech to International Botanical Congress, St. Louis, MO, Aug. 3, 1999

3. World Resources Institute, “Ecosystems: Forests,” WRI Factsheet, Washington DC, 2001

4. World Resources Institute, World Resources 1998-99, Oxford University Press, 1998

5. Food and Agriculture Organization, “State of World Fisheries & Aquaculture 2000,” Rome, 2000

6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Policymakers Summary, 2000” Bonn, 2000

7. Al-Sultan, Fawzi H., President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), speech to Fourth International Conference of Parties to Combat Desertification, Bonn, Germany, December 2000

8. UN Population Fund (UNFPA), Population & Sustainable Development: Five Years after Rio, UNFPA, New York, 1997