PRESS CONFERENCE ON LAUNCH OF MILLENNIUM ECOSYSTEM ASSESSMENT

A press conference was held at Headquarters today on the occasion of the launch of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).  Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the event with a brief introductory statement.

“Last year”, said the Secretary-General, “in the Millennium Report to the General Assembly, I pointed out that there has never been a comprehensive global assessment of the world’s major ecosystems.  The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a response to this need.

“It is designed to bring the world’s best science to bear on the pressing choices we face in managing the global environment.  It will examine the influence of human activities on the environment, and how, in turn, those changes are affecting our future prospects for health and well-being.”

“Most of all”, the Secretary-General told correspondents, "the Assessment promises to help us improve the lives and livelihoods of the poor, and make considerable gains in our efforts to find an equitable and sustainable balance between environment and development."

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was truly a global effort, he said.  It was being launched not only in New York, but also in Beijing, Havana, London, Tokyo and Turin.  It was "an outstanding example of the partnerships that are, increasingly, the way the United Nations works.” 

Following the Secretary-General’s opening remarks (see Press Release SG/SM/7836 - UNEP/93), Mr. Adnan Amin, Director of the New York office of UNEP, called the Assessment an “unprecedented scientific effort to map the health of the global ecosystems and to propose measures to address this in the future.”  Today’s panel, he noted, reflected the partnership approach to the Assessment, which underlay its rationale.

He then introduced the participants in the press conference: 

Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation; Angela Cropper,

Co-Chair, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Panel; Mohamed T. El-Ashry, Chief Executive Office, Global Environment Facility; and Jonathan Lash, President, World Resources Institute.

Mr. Wirth said the result of the Assessment would be the first global report card on the environment.  The Assessment was important because humans were living off their “ecological capital”, and if it continued, “we will soon discover that this is a bankrupt way to operate in the world”. 

He said the bulk of the world economy was rooted in five biological systems: croplands, forests, grasslands, oceans and fresh waterways.  In the jargon of economic globalization, the economy was a “wholly owned subsidiary of the environment”.  When the environment was forced to file for bankruptcy, because its resource base had been polluted and degraded, the economy went bankrupt with it, and so did everything else. 

That was why the Secretary-General’s call for an equitable and sustainable balance between the environment and economic development was absolutely critical, he said.  The Assessment would be the first comprehensive report card on that balance and was itself crucial.

Mr. El-Ashry said all of us were constantly reminded of human dependence on natural ecosystems, and the threats faced when those systems were not managed sustainably.  From forest fires in South-East Asia to floods in China, Central America and Mozambique, natural events had been exacerbated by human degradation of ecosystems.  In every case, it was the poor who had suffered the most. 

International cooperation for sustainable development demanded an understanding of the linkage between the health of the environment and human actions.  His organization, with its focus on global issues like biodiversity loss, viewed the Assessment as a major contribution to that endeavour.  Over the last seven or eight years, he noted, the Global Environment Facility had committed more than $1.5 billion for bio-diversity conservation in developing countries, complemented by another $2 billion of co-financing.  However, when the scale of the problems was considered, it was clear that much more should be done.

He said “if we hope to maintain and replenish the natural systems that sustain us, we must be able to give decision-makers at all levels accurate and relevant information on the vitality of life support systems”.  The Assessment would help provide such information and would help to build human and institutional capacity. 

Ms. Cropper said the Assessment would seek to provide baseline information on the patterns of use associated with various ecosystems, and would present information on trends in ecosystem goods and services.  The Assessment would also seek to present a range of plausible scenarios for how the quantity and quality of ecosystem goods and services might change in the coming decades in different regions of the world, and how that would affect economic health and development.

All of that, she said, would lead to identification of the policy, institutional, legislative and technological responses for improving the management of ecosystems, thereby increasing their contribution to development, while sustaining their integrity.  In a nutshell, it was hoped that the Assessment would answer the question of what was happening now and in the foreseeable future to earth’s capacity to support nature and civilization.

While the Assessment could not prescribe the responses that must be made, it would be designed to directly assist decision-makers to assess the impact of their various actions on the viability of ecosystems nationally and globally.  It was for this reason that it must be conducted in an integrated way, with ecologists, social scientists and policy analysts and makers working side-by-side.  In spite of its scope and scale, she was optimistic that the undertaking would succeed.

Mr. Lash noted that the Assessment involved institutions from the United Nations, the private sector and non-governmental organizations.  It entailed collaboration across every region and from all of the scientific disciplines.  The Assessment would work because there were several hundred scientists who would participate voluntarily in trying to contribute knowledge to the decision-making processes in the world. 

He noted the contribution of the institutions represented at the press conference, adding that the Packard Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and the Governments of Norway and Sweden had been generous supporters of the endeavour.  The Assessment had been a model of multi-sectoral collaboration, and it would only succeed if it continued to be that.

If the Assessment was successful, he said, the outcome in a few years would indicate the state of the world’s health in terms of its capacity to produce the goods and services that supported all human well-being and prosperity.  It was a critical process “in which the very best doctors had been asked in to give the earth a physical”. 

He stressed that while the trends that would be assessed were global, almost all the decisions that determined the health of ecosystems were local.  An important part of the process would be the creation of models for regional and local assessment.  In that regard, it was critical that the private sector be involved.  The Assessment’s board included major representatives of that group.

Mr. Amin noted that the significance of the Assessment was not just to help understand the health of the planet, but also to place decision-making tools at the centre of economic and social decision-making. 

In response to a correspondent’s request for examples that would put “a face” on some of the urgent problems confronting ecosystems, Ms. Cropper cited dying coral reefs, the degradation of forests and depleted fish stocks. 

Mr. Lash pointed out that two-thirds of the world’s agricultural lands were seriously degraded, at the same time as the number of peoples dependent on them was expanding.  He also noted that 90 per cent of the coral reefs in Fiji had been bleached and the fish -– upon which the population depended for protein -- had almost disappeared.  The question for the Assessment was whether these were anecdotes or global trends.

In response to another correspondent’s questions, Mr. Lash said the target date for completion of the Assessment was 2004.  Regarding the donation by the of some 16,000 satellite images of the earth and whether or not the Assessment would make use of them, he said the only way the endeavour was possible was because of the rapid development of the technology for using space-based data.

Ms. Cropper added that meetings had been held with NASA to assess whatever data they could make available, and that a meeting would be held in a month to discuss the necessary information support systems for the data.  She also said, in response to another of the correspondent’s questions, that many different types of scientists -– including oceanographers -– would be taking part in the Assessment.

Mr. Amin said that NASA had just last month announced the donation of the images, which were worth about $20 million to the UNEP.  The UNEP’s initial findings after beginning to sift through the photos had indicated the degradation of the Mesopotamian wetlands.  There would be a great deal of information relevant to that situation and others.

Mr. Wirth then pointed out that the data from the images would require interpretative capability that would cost some $15 million.

Mr. Lash, responding to another question, gave a breakdown of the funding which had thus far been provided for the project, which totalled some $17 million.  The major contributor was the Global Environment Facility with a contribution of $7 million, and the United Nations Foundation would provide $4 million.

Mr. Wirth then informed correspondents that a two-hour television documentary on the issues taken up by the Assessment, narrated by William Moyers and entitled “Earth on Edge”, would be aired on 19 June.

A correspondent asked the panellists to contrast and compare the Assessment to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which some had considered controversial.  How controversial did they feel the Assessment would be considered, particularly when it came to specifics in terms of problems and solutions and the economics of solutions? 

Mr. Wirth said the IPCC had probably been the most distinguished collection of scientists and scholars in scientific history.  Attacks on the IPCC were mindless and ignorant.  If the Assessment were as successful as the IPCC –- which had been one of the project’s models -– then it would be an enormous success. 

Mr. El-Ashry added that those who considered the IPCC controversial and didn’t believe its outcome were focused on the short term and on what could be taken out of the earth today, rather than on the long term.  “We need to go back to nature and see how it can provide us more for this generation as well as for the generations to come,” he said.

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