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News 3 Mar 05 Increasing Aid Effectiveness to Achieve the Millenium Development Goals: With or Without the Environment? full PDF | about the Paris meeting | about the Millennium Development Goals High-level Forum of Ministers of Finance and Development Cooperation adopts the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness It is clear that the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals requires the doubling of aid from the international community and substantial improvements in the way that aid is used - but the role of conservation and the environment seems to be less clear. "There is truly little recognition outside of the environment community that biodiversity loss affects the very basis on which poverty eradication and development more broadly depends. To put it in other terms, MDG 7 on environmental sustainability underpins the achievement of all the other MDGs", said Sebastian Winkler, Senior Policy Officer of The World Conservation Union. Winkler made his comment at a High-level Forum of Ministers of Finance and Development Cooperation from 28 February to 2 March in Paris, France. The Ministers came up with the Paris Declaration, which outlines how the effectiveness of international aid can be improved. In 2003, Official Development Assistance (ODA) represented USD 70 billion and financed some 60'000 projects, of which 85 percent are less than USD 1 million. This puts a major burden of management on developing countries. Participants at the high-level forum made an attempt to adopt clear targets and indicators to increase ownership of the South in defining their own development priorities and to improve donor coordination through increased harmonization, alignment and managing for results. One of the contentious issues at the meeting was whether or not to include a reference to the environment and conservation in the Paris Declaration, with several countries saying that such a reference was unnecessary. Fortunately, a reference is included in the final declaration thanks to others who defended the need for clear goals and targets. Given follow-up meetings such as the G8 meeting in July and the MDG+5 Review in New York later this year, the important lesson of this Forum is that the case for conservation and the environment, and especially its contribution to the livelihoods of people, needs to be made consistently and convincingly to the development community. "Maintaining the environment on this international development agenda proves to be a challenge. The conservation community needs to have a stronger voice in the development debate," said Winkler at the Paris Meeting. links Related articles on Global issues: biodiversity biodiversity loss, extinction threats, commercial applications of biodiversity |
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