Environment, Climate Change and the MDGs: Reshaping the Development Agenda

With the aim of ensuring that the U.N. High-level Event gives adequate priority to the critical role of improved environmental management in efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Poverty-Environment Partnership (PEP) will host a policy dialogue on “Environment, Climate Change and the MDGs: Reshaping the Development Agenda.”

Click here to watch a webcast of the event.

This event builds on the outcomes of the PEP events held in conjunction with the 2005 World Summit – the PEP High-level Policy Dialogue on “Investing in the Environment to Fight Poverty”and the Head of State Dinner on “Environment for the MDGs: Celebrating Leadership, Innovation and Action.”

The event will highlight progress on major 2005 commitments, including the UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative, IUCN’s Conservation for Poverty Reduction Initiative, and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Achievements and lessons learned from these initiatives will provide world leaders with concrete evidence that investment in sound and equitable environmental management makes real economic sense and is critical to expanding opportunities for people in developing countries to lift themselves out of poverty. These and other key messages from the policy dialogue will inform the three Head-of-State Roundtables at the MDG Summit on (1) Poverty and Hunger, (2) Education and Health, and (3) Environmental Sustainability.

Four cross-cutting themes will underpin the policy dialogue presentations and discussion:

• The critical importance of poverty-health-environment linkages to achieving the MDGs in a rapidly changing development landscape transformed by climate change and ecosystem decline.

• The need for more integrated approaches to poverty-health-environment challenges – rather than seeing them as separate and isolated. For example, food, fuel and climate have to be tackled together and not as separate problems.

• The critical role of improved governance and strong local institutions capable of responding to the new development challenges and opportunities facing the poor.

• We are now at the halfway point – where do we go from here: what new/renewed commitments need to be made in order to achieve the MDGs.