ISLAMABAD, June 3: Soil erosion has reduced global food productivity by 15 to 30 per cent, UNDP resident representative Onder Yucer said on Monday.
He was speaking at a workshop on “Building partnerships for environmental sustainability”, organized by the UNDP in collaboration with the environment ministry in connection with the World Environment Day.
He mentioned the alarming global trends pointed out in the UN Global Environment Outlook 2002 report. In developing countries, he said, the pace of soil degradation had accelerated over the past 50 years. Agricultural productivity is declining in many places, specially in Asia, Africa and Central America where two third of the world population lives.
Mr Yucer said logging and conversion had shrunk the world’s forests by as much as half and tropical deforestation now exceeded 130,000 square kilometres per year. This has resulted in global warming, loss of biodiversity and reduced access to forest resources on which the poor depend.
Dilating on the water situation, he said one third of the world’s people now lived in countries where water was in short supply and about one among every five people lacked access to safe drinking water. He said the increasingly urgent struggle in many regions of the world for access to shared water resources had the potential to escalate into armed conflict, making development efforts in those regions more difficult.
About fisheries, the UNDP resident representative said the reduction of marine, coastal and freshwater natural fish stocks threatened many of the world’s poor who depended on fish as their primary source of protein.
In the field of energy, he said, two billion people lacked access to basic energy services for cooking, heating and lighting, and remained largely dependent on firewood to meet their daily energy needs.
Warning about dangers of climate change, he said developing countries were likely to have the most difficult time responding to the consequences of global warming. Shifting agricultural zones and the rise of sea levels can have disastrous effects on many communities that have little capacity to cope with such changes.
Mr Yucer said according to the World Bank estimates for developing countries, the economic cost of the environmental degradation was four to eight per cent of Gross Domestic Product.
Earlier, in her welcome speech, Assistant Resident Representative and the UNDP environment unit chief, Razina Bilgrami, said the planet was suffering from a multitude of problems such as global warming, prolonged droughts, degradation of natural resources and associated loss of biodiversity, rampant increase in pollution levels and deteriorating water quality.
She said the impact of pollution and natural resource degradation on the health of human beings was worrisome. The worsening condition of the environment is destroying fragile ecosystems and displacing communities, especially women from productive activities. Environmental conditions continues to increase economic and social costs in many developing countries, threatening the foundation of sustainable development, she added.
The workshop, she said, was aimed at bringing together leaders, practitioners, government and civil society partners to focus on building partnerships to develop and strengthen linkages among environmental projects. This will be done through sharing experiences and knowledge management to develop an informal network of environmental conservation and sustainable development practitioners.