Biodiversity, Climate Change, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Same Old Problems

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Oct 25 2007 (IPS) - Urban poverty and chaotic urban growth, loss of biodiversity, degradation of marine ecosystems and water and air pollution are just a few of the serious environmental problems that continue to plague Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.N. Environment Programme said Thursday in a new global report.

“There are many pending tasks in South America,” Chilean chemical engineer Héctor Jorquera told IPS. “We have problems of pollution in cities and of availability of water resources, threatened and endangered species, over-exploitation of marine resources, and a rise in diseases (especially skin cancer) caused by the thinning of the ozone layer, which is having an extremely strong effect at the southern tip of the continent.”

Jorquera was one of the authors of chapter two, on the atmosphere, of UNEP’s fourth “Global Environment Outlook: Environment for Development” report (GEO-4).

Drawn up by 390 experts and reviewed by another 1,000 around the world, GEO-4 describes the global changes seen since 1987 and assesses the current state of the atmosphere, land, water and biodiversity, while identifying priorities for action.

Urban poverty is one problem that cuts across the Latin American and Caribbean region, said Jorquera, a professor at the Catholic University of Chile, who took part in the report’s presentation in Santiago Thursday.

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanised region in the developing world. From 1987 to 2005, the urban population grew from 69 to 77 percent of the region’s total inhabitants. In the Southern Cone – a geographic area made up of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and parts of Brazil and Paraguay – the proportion stands at an even higher 87 percent. And nearly 40 percent of urban families live on less than a dollar a day.

Poverty, which implies reduced access to health care, clean water and sanitation, also renders people more vulnerable to phenomena like floods, heat waves, drought, smog, and water and sewage-borne infectious diseases, Jorquera pointed out.

GEO-4 reports that although 81 percent of solid waste generated by towns and cities in the region is collected, only 23 percent receives adequate treatment. Not much better than in the case of sewage, only 14 percent of which is treated. In addition, soil degradation affects 15 percent of Latin America – 26 percent of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) and 14 percent of South America.

At the same time, the region has the greatest diversity of species in the world and is home to several of the world’s biggest rivers. Six countries – Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela – are considered mega-diverse.

Threats facing the region’s biodiversity are loss of habitat, land degradation, land-use change, deforestation and marine pollution, says the report, which notes that 66 percent of global loss of forest cover between 2000 and 2005 occurred in Latin America.

“The situation has not improved much in the last few years. The problems persist, and there is no vigorous response from the different societies and governments in terms of tackling the problems at their roots,” said Jorquera.

“Another aspect that needs to be emphasised much more in the region is the availability of more detailed information on what is happening, because in many places we don’t know what’s going on, simply because there are no statistics,” he said.

GEO-4 does recognise progress on some fronts, however. It notes, for example, that the area under protection almost doubled between 1985 and 2006, and now makes up 10.5 percent of the total territory of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a higher proportion in South America (10.6 percent) and Mesoamerica (10.1 percent) than in the Caribbean (7.8 percent).

Jorquera also pointed to improvement in some fuels and transport systems, and said there is greater public awareness of environmental issues overall.

The problems in Latin America described by the report are nothing new: “soil erosion – the cancer of our land – deforestation and water and air pollution,” said University of Chile Professor Nicolo Gligo, who coordinated Chile’s State of the Environment Report 2005, sponsored by UNEP and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“I gauge progress in terms of statistics, and there are no figures indicating that we have improved, with the exception of a reduction of ozone-thinning pollutants,” he told IPS.

Another question discussed by GEO-4 is the region’s vulnerability to climate change.

Jorquera said that in recent years, an increase in rainfall has been seen in southeastern Brazil, the pampas (grasslands) of Argentina, and Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as flooding in Bolivia. At the same time, there has been lower rainfall in southern Chile, southwestern Argentina, southern Peru and the western part of Central America.

A particularly worrisome development is that glaciers in the Andes mountains and in the southern Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina have shrunk alarmingly.

The Antizana glacier in Ecuador retreated eight times faster in the 1990s than in previous decades, and the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia lost over half of its area since 1990, says the report.

Glaciers and water reserves will continue to shrink and land degradation and desertification will advance in central Chile and Argentina, according to projections, said Jorquera.

The rising sea level, meanwhile, is threatening the Rio de la Plata estuary, and an increase in skin cancer cases is expected in the southern part of the continent.

Also predicted are reduced availability of water and the loss of between 20 and 45 percent of tree species in Brazil by the end of the century.

The lack of monitoring, human capital, and institutions dedicated to fighting climate change hinder the region’s capacity to mitigate and adapt to the phenomenon, said the expert.

What is the report’s message to governments in the region?

“That they should put environmental issues higher up on their list of priorities, and that they should coordinate among themselves to be able to negotiate with the most powerful countries and interest groups, which are going to oppose greater improvements to the environment, because that will mean that he who pollutes pays or is required to assume the costs of the clean-up,” said Jorquera.

“For that, strong institutions and citizen support are needed,” he added.

The report also calls for salvaging and safeguarding the traditional knowledge of the more than 400 indigenous groups in the region, who, it says, stand out for their sustainable management of the natural resources in their territories.