The
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the
Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign, people, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to
enter tree planting pledges online on
www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign
with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide each year. In a call to further individual and collective action, UNEP has set a new goal of planting 7 billion trees by the end of 2009. The campaign strongly encourages the planting of indigenous trees and trees that are appropriate to the local environment.
CLUSTERDOS advocates for the United Nations Millenium Development Goals!
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world’s main development challenges. The MDGs are drawn from the actions and targets contained in the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 191 member countries of the United Nations,during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.
This unprecedented global framework for development is a crucial step towards ending poverty and inequality.
However, at the halfway point to the 2015 deadline for the achievement of the Goals, we have seen some progress, but much more needs to be done. Urgent action must be taken by nations if they are to fulfill their promise to achieve the MDGs. Since agreeing to make the MDGs a key framework for international action and cooperation to reduce poverty, much progress has been made.
But despite the gains, no region in the world is on-track to achieve all of the Goals, and some regions are off-track on many of them. Uurgent action is needed to implement sound policies to achieve the Goals set in 2000, and deliver on the promise made to the world’s poor in the Millennium Declaration:
“We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected”
The eight MDGs break down into 21 quantifiable targets that are measured by 60 indicators. The eight MDGs are:
1. eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. achieve universal primary education
3. promote gender equality and empower women
4. reduce child mortality
5. improve maternal health
6. combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases
7. ensure environmental sustainability
8. develop a global partnership for development
The MDGs:
* synthesise, in a single package, many of the most important commitments made separately at the international conferences and summits of the 1990s;
* recognise explicitly the interdependence between growth, poverty reduction and sustainable development
* acknowledge that development rests on the foundations of democratic governance, the rule of law, respect for human rights and peace and security
* are based on time-bound and measurable targets accompanied by indicators for monitoring progress;
* bring together, in the eighth Goal, the responsibilities of developing countries with those of developed countries.
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