United Nations Millennium Development Goals
GOAL 7:
ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Target 7.A:
Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources
- Forest area increase in Asia is helping to slow, but not reverse, global losses worldwide.
- Of all developing regions, South America and Africa saw the largest net losses of forest areas between 2000 and 2010.
- In the 25 years since the adoption of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, there has been a reduction of over 98 per cent in the consumption of ozone-depleting substances.
- At Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, world leaders approved an agreement entitled “The Future We Want,” and more than $513 billion was pledged towards sustainable devlopment initiatives.
Target 7.B:
Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving,
by 2010, a significant reduction in the
rate of loss
- More areas of the earth’s surface are protected. Since 1990, protected areas have increased in number by 58 per cent.
- Growth in protected areas varies across countries and territories and not all protected areas cover key biodiversity sites.
- By 2010, protected areas covered 12.7 per cent of the world’s land area but only 1.6 per cent of total ocean area.
Target 7.C:
Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population
without sustainable access to safe drinking water
and basic sanitation
- The world has met the target of halving the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water, five years ahead of schedule.
- Between 1990 and 2010, more than two billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources.
- The proportion of people using an improved water source rose from 76 per cent in 1990 to 89 per cent in 2010.
- Over 40 per cent of all people without improved drinking water live in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Eleven per cent of the global population—783 million people—remains without access to an improved source of drinking water and, at the current pace, 605 million people will still lack coverage in 2015.
- Access to improved sanitation facilities increased from 36 per cent in 1990 to 56 per cent in 2010 in the developing regions as a whole. The greatest progress was achieved in Eastern and Southern Asia.
- Despite progress, 2.5 billion in developing countries still lack access to improved sanitation facilities.
Target 7.D:
Achieve, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers
- The target was met well in advance of the 2020 deadline.
- The share of urban slum residents in the developing world declined from 39 per cent in 2000 to 33 per cent in 2012. More than 200 million of these people gained access to improved water sources, improved sanitation facilities, or durable or less crowded housing, thereby exceeding the MDG target
- 863 million people are estimated to be living in slums in 2012 compared to 650 million in 1990 and 760 million in 2000
Featured story
Sanitation one toilet at a time:
The Sanitation for All Drive to 2015 has highlight projects ranging from Cambodia, where members of one community took steps to improve sanitation throughout their village, to Mozambique, where hundreds of communities declared themselves open defecation free.
Community-led total sanitation continues to be one of the most effective ways of eliminating open defecation and accelerating the use of improved sanitation facilities. A lack of toilets remains one of the leading causes of illnesses killing an estimated 2 million children each year.
Over the last five years, UNICEF-supported projects in 50 countries have led to more than 39,000 communities, with a total population of over 24 million people, being declared free of open defecation. In India, where a total sanitation approach is being applied on a large scale, the MDG target for sanitation will likely be met and exceeded.
MDG 7 Infographic
