Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and human well-being. Poverty is also sustained by
corruption, the absence of property rights, insufficient
legal protection, and the inability of many people to
borrow money to grow crops or start a small business.
According to the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP), it will cost about $50 billion per
year to provide universal access to basic services such
as education, health, nutrition, family planning, safe
water, and sanitation. This amount is less than 0.1% of
the world's annual income and a mere fraction of what
the world devotes each year to military spending (Fig-
ure 18-13).
Solutions: Reducing Poverty
We can sharply cut poverty by forgiving the
international debts of the poorest countries and
greatly increasing international aid and small
individual loans to help the poor help themselves.
Analysts point out that reducing poverty will require
the governments of most developing countries to
make policy changes. For example, they need to shift
more of the national budget to help the rural and ur-
ban poor work their way out of poverty. They also
need to give villages, villagers, and the urban poor
title to common lands and to crops and trees they plant
on them.
One way to help reduce global poverty might be to
forgive at least 60% of the $2.4 trillion debt that devel-
oping countries owe to developed countries and inter-
national lending agencies, and all of the $422 billion
debt of the poorest and most heavily indebted coun-
tries. This would be done on the condition that the
money saved on interest debt be devoted to meeting
basic human needs. Currently, de-
veloping countries pay almost $300
billion per year in interest to devel-
oped countries to service their debt.
Developed countries can also
take the following steps:
Solutions: Making the Transition
to an Eco-Economy
An eco-economy copies nature's four principles of
sustainability and uses various economic strategies to
help implement full-cost pricing.
An eco-economy mimics the processes that sustain
the earth's natural systems (Figure 6-19, p. 126). Fig-
ure 18-14 lists principles that Paul Hawken and other
business leaders and economists have suggested for
using the sustainability strategies and economic tools
discussed in this chapter to make the transition to
more environmentally sustainable economies over the
next several decades. Hawken has a simple golden
rule for such an economy:
“Leave the world better than
you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm
life or the environment, and make amends if you do.”
Expenditures per year (2003)
World military
$956 billion
U.S. military
$449 billion
■
Increase nonmilitary govern-
ment and private aid, with mecha-
nisms to assure that most of it
goes directly to the poor to help
them become more self-reliant
and to help provide social safety
nets such as welfare, unemploy-
ment payments, and pension
benefits
■
Mount a massive global effort
to combat malnutrition and the in-
fectious diseases that kill millions
of people prematurely and help
perpetuate poverty
■
Have lending agencies make
small loans to poor people who
want to increase their income (see
Solutions, p. 423)
■
Make investments in small-
scale infrastructure such as solar-
cell power facilities in villages
(Figure 13-34, p. 316), small-scale
irrigation projects, and farm-to-
market roads
U.S. highways
$29 billion
U.S. pet foods
$12 billion
U.S. EPA
$8 billion
U.S. foreign aid
$8 billion
U.S. cosmetics
$8 billion
Expenditures per year needed to
Eliminate
hunger and
malnutrition
$19 billion
Provide clean
drinking water
for all
Provide basic
health care
for all
$12 billion
$11 billion
Protect
tropical
forests
Figure 18-13
Ethics:
what should our prior-
ities be? (Data from United Nations, World
Health Organization, U.S. Department of
Commerce, and U.S. Office of Management
and Budget)
$8 billion
Eliminate
illiteracy
$5 billion
