World Summit on Sustainable Development - Policy Brief #1 - Overview Continues

Poverty
What the world learned: The World Bank and other international entities embraced a definition of poverty that looks beyond lack of income to include other essentials for human well-being, especially health and education. But the income measure of poverty is still relevant, and sobering: 2.8 billion people live on less than 2 dollars per day.

What goals were set: World leaders committed themselves to reducing poverty, and the extreme disparities between the rich and poor. In 1998, a joint report by the OECD, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank pledged to cut income poverty by half by 2015, and to reduce child and maternal mortality, among other goals.

What happened: The share of the world's people living on a dollar or less per day fell from 29 percent in 1990 to 24 percent in 1998. Still, 1.2 billion remain under this threshold. Mortality of children under 5 fell from 86 deaths per 1000 children in 1990 to 78 deaths in 1999. Inequality remained the glaring norm: the richest billion receive 78% of world income. Child mortality was more than 19 times greater in low-income than in wealthy countries in 1999.

Consume and Dispose Economies
What the world learned: Global consumption of metals, minerals, wood, plastic, and other materials increased some 2.4-fold between 1960 and 1995. The "ecological footprint," a conceptual tool that emerged at mid-decade to provide a rough measure of the environmental impact of consumption of materials, food and fuel, showed that 3 Earths would be needed to sustain the entire world at an American level of consumption.

What goals were set: A growing body of researchers proposed cost-effective strategies for reducing materials use by up to 90 percent in industrial countries. Imaginative suggestions included capturing and reusing factory wastes, designing durables such as copiers and automobiles to be remanufactured, holding producers perpetually responsible for the materials they send into the world, and where possible, meeting consumer needs with services such as mass transit, rather than materials-intensive goods, such as cars.

What happened: Recycling rates increased for household disposables in many countries, but stagnated at 30-50 percent in industrial countries. Declines in materials use per person, and in material needed to produce a dollar of GNP, were encouraging, but total materials use and extraction of virgin materials continued to climb. A treaty to eliminate use of 10 toxic, long-lived chemicals, and to reduce emissions of two industrial byproducts, was completed in 2001, but has not yet entered into force.

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