Millennium Development Goal 7: Protecting the environment

DFID's approach to the environment(858 kb) | Water and sanitation

Poor people often have limited access to clean water and fresh air, fertile land and fertile crops, and the healthy livestock and other animals that are essential for livelihoods and health. Also, it is the poor who usually bear the brunt of environmental hazards and degradation.

In addition, poor people and poor countries are dependent on natural resources such as timber, agricultural crops, fuel and minerals for their livelihoods and for economic growth. So, sound environmental management and the sustainable use of natural resources are essential to economic growth in developing countries.

DFID is helping to tackle environmental problems by:

• Working to improve forest governance and trade;
• Helping to accelerate reforms that will support better livelihoods and more responsible management of forests (under the Rights and Resources Initiative);
• Committing to double our assistance to water and sanitation in Africa to £95 million a year by 2007/08, and more than doubling funding again to £200 million by 2010/11;
• Supporting a programme with civil society organisations in Kenya that aims to better represent the needs of poor communities to the Government and improve legislation for poor people;
• Significantly increasing research funding to improve the capacity of African countries to adapt to climate change;
• Working to improve climate science in Africa through the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS);
• Helping to develop guidance on how to screen all development investments for the effects of climate change;
• Supporting UN Habitat, the UN agency leading on urban development and shelter, to improve the lives of slum-dwellers;
• Funding a number of regional and country programmes, such as the large urban services programmes in Kolkata Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in India, which total £266 million;
• Supporting the Climate Investment Funds and the Environmental Transformation Fund.

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However, there are a number of environmental problems to tackle:

• Assessments of national development plans by the World Bank have shown limited integration of the environment;
• Environmental assets (such as clean water, clean air, fertile crops) provide roughly two-thirds of household income for the rural poor, but the loss of environmental resources continues (forest cover, for example, has declined by 7.3 million hectares per year over the past five years – an area about the size of Sierra Leone);
• Climate change is a major threat to development: natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods are expected to increase in intensity and severity, higher temperatures will cause diseases like malaria to spread, shorter and more changeable rainy seasons will cause crops to fail and greater competition over resources could lead to conflict;
• Over 1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation;
• According to UN Habitat, there are currently 989 million slum-dwellers worldwide, and this is expected to increase to 1.4 billion by 2020 if current trends do not change.

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Links

• Management and protection of the environment during humanitarian response
• How we fight poverty: Climate
• Poverty Environment Partnership
• Strategic Environmental Assessment for Development Co-operation
• Stern Review on Economics of Climate Change
• Climate Change Research in Africa – DFID is providing financial support to the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa research programme, together with the International Development Research Centre
• Artisanal and small-scale mining – DFID contributes funding toCommunities and Small Scale Mining Initiative (CASM)
• Forestry and Illegal Logging
• WaterAid
• Cities Alliance – a coalition of cities and development partners committed to scaling up successful approaches to poverty reduction.
• Community Planning
• UN MDG indicators site

Last updated: 17 July 2008