A Midpoint Look at the Millennium Development Goals

July 10, 2007—The best way to get into the hearts and minds of today's youth is, undoubtedly, music.

And this past weekend, the world's most popular musicians staged a series of "Live Earth" events spanning 24 hours across seven continents to dramatize the threat of global warming and mobilize people to do something about it.

While global public awareness and interest in climate change has intensified in the last few years, this has long been on the radar screen of the international development community.

Environmental sustainability is considered to be an important development safeguard and was included as one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global targets of how to improve the lives of poor people in the world.

This year marks the halfway point to reaching the MDGs. They were put in place in 2000 and were set to be attained by the year 2015.

The world's countries, particularly the poorest ones, have made substantial but uneven progress, according to the United Nations' annual report which focuses on the countries' successes and setbacks.

The new report echoes findings released earlier this year in the World Bank's Global Monitoring Report 2007, which found impressive progress in reducing poverty worldwide but much less progress in most of the other goals, including slowing climate change and other steps to protect the environment.

Ensuring environmental sustainability—integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reversing the loss of environmental resources, providing access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, improving the lives of slum dwellers—is outlined in the Millennium Development Goals as an important part of the global development agenda.

The UN report says "a global effort to eliminate ozone-depleting substances is working, though damage to the ozone layer will persist for some time." The damaged ozone layer can't start to heal until there is a significant reduction in chlorofluorocarbons, like Freon, that are still widely used in commerce and industry.

Global warming is caused by holes in the ozone layer and the steady buildup of carbon. The World Bank's published interactive map gives country-by-country data on emissions of carbon dioxide.

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