We're almost done with our week-long examination of the United Nations' eight Millennium Development Goals! MDG 7 seeks to Ensure Environmental Sustainability. Its targets are:
- integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources;
- reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss;
- halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation; and
- achieve, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Here, again, the United Nations has the opportunity to place women at the center as key actors in the world's agricultural economy.
In Panama, as a result of the environmental degradation of their rainforest, 95% of Panama's Indigenous groups live in poverty. The women that are responsible for providing their families with food and medicine are hard-hit by the destruction of the rainforest. Through our program, Defending People and Planet, MADRE supports community workshops that enable Indigenous women to recover Indigenous knowledge of biodiversity and secure agricultural seeds in danger of extinction. These women are also being trained in eco-tourism, providing them with income without risking further environmental degradation. Consequentially, poverty is eased while environmental destruction is reduced. Women are working to protect their environment, conserve biodiversity, and fight for their rights. As fundamental participants in the agricultural sector, women can also be the solution to ensuring environmental sustainability.
For more on climate change and environmental degradation, and its disproportionate impact on women, watch UNIFEM's video about the Colombian Wayuu people: