ENVIRONMENT-U.N.: A Low-Budget Scheme Has Ambitious Aims

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Samanta Sen

LONDON, Mar 21 2002 (IPS) - Two million U.S. dollars is not a lot of money to tackle poverty and save the environment around the equatorial belt – especially if that belt is defined as the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.

But the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched the Equator Initiative that aims to do just that. The initiative aims at encouraging communities around the world to find their own models for promoting wealth for themselves while protecting the environment.

“Since the Rio summit some of the greatest successes have come at the local level,” Charles Ian McNeill, environmental policy adviser with the UNDP told IPS in London last week after the European launch of the Initiative. “We have to magnify and multiply these trends, and to help communities share with one another,” he said.

The initiative recognises that there are many effective ways in which local communities are working already to create wealth while protecting their environment. The new initiative does not seek to launch projects but to spread information on successful local projects that are already going. The programme will cover 110 countries that fall into this broad belt.

One of its first steps is the institution of awards that will recognise five projects that exemplify “extraordinary accomplishment in reducing poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in the equatorial belt.” Each of the winners will get an award of 30,000 dollars.

The awards will recognise partnerships between communities and non-governmental organisations, the private sector, government and other groups. The awards will be presented at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to take place in Johannesburg in South Africa from August 26 to September 4.

The UNDP then proposes to spotlight these success stories and to spread information about them for others to follow. The UNDP will help other communities interact with these groups and to learn from them.

The innovative project runs a different course from most UNDP projects.

The UNDP has given out about 3.8 billion dollars in grants since the Rio summit 10 years ago. It currently has an annual budget of about 900 million dollars. Most of this money has paid for actual projects carried out with UNDP plan approvals. With the Equator Initiative the UNDP looks at what others are doing.

The UNDP is not paying even all of the two million dollars for this project. The project was launched in January in New York. It now has seven partners. These are the UNDP, the Brazilian NGO BrasilConnects, the Government of Canada, the International Development Research Centre, IUCN – The World Conservation Union, Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), and the United Nations Foundation. A partner needs to pay a minimum of 100,000 dollars to join the project.

The project marked its European launch at the British Museum in London Tuesday evening. TVE and IUCN – The World Conservation Union are the only two European partners of the initiative. The UNDP wants to rope in more.

“The North-South transfer of technology has not worked,” said McNeill. “We are preparing a South-South transfer of knowledge.” Beyond communication of one successful project to others, the UNDP will then step in to disseminate information worldwide “and from there to influence government policies,” McNeill said.

These projects, he said, can also be educative to the North. “We want to dispel a sense of resignation,” said McNeill. “Issues of biodiversity and poverty are depressing, discouraging, upsetting,” he said. The UNDP followed the launch of the Initiative in London with a workshop “to think through what it will take to get this message across,” McNeill said.

A primary area where the UNDP is looking for models is the Amazon forest in Brazil. “The forest which covers about five million square kilometres is home to about 15 per cent of world biodiversity, and is home also to some of the poorest people in Brazil,” chief executive for BrasilConnects Edemar Cid Serreira said at the London launch.

“The Amazon forest is home to about 20 million inhabitants,” he said. People in Brazil are very concerned about the Amazon forest, “and they want to translate that concern into policies,” Serreira said.

Sara J. Scherr, senior policy analyst with the Washington-based NGO Forest Trends says the project is “a great way to spend a relatively small amount of money.”

This kind of project can “raise consciousness about real places and real people,” Scherr told IPS. “We’d like to see this kind of effort followed up with farmer exchanges, where farmers can actually visit some of these examples of managing agricultural resources.”

The new emphasis on learning from people rather than telling them what to do is a welcome trend that is catching on, she said. “You now have a critical mass of people thinking like this who are having a positive and demonstrable impact on the ground.”