G8 seeks new drive to meet 2015 aid goals for poor

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes part in the G8/G20 National Youth Caucus on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, May 17, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Chris Wattie

Reuters) – The Group of Eight industrialized nations plan to invest in better health for mothers and young children in poor nations to meet faltering goals for slashing world poverty by 2015, a draft text for a G8 summit said.

The five-page draft for the June 25-26 summit in Canada, dated March 12, said the “greatest economic crisis in generations” had “jeopardized our ability to meet the 2015 targets” for aiding developing nations set in 2000.

It was unclear how far the text, obtained by Reuters on Monday and including references to progress toward world economic recovery, had changed in recent weeks with shockwaves from a debt crisis in Greece.

“We undertake to champion a new initiative on maternal, newborn and under-five child health,” according to the draft. It left a blank for how much money the eight nations would provide.

“Urgent collective action must be taken to regain lost ground and quicken the pace of progress” toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it said. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sought focus on women and children.

In 2000, world leaders agreed 2015 goals for slashing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths, and for improving the environment, education and gender equality.

Among the goals lagging most, more than 500,000 women die every year from causes linked to pregnancy and nearly nine million children die before they reach the age of five, the G8 said.

CLIMATE

The draft also said G8 nations would seek a new legal framework for a U.N.-led deal to combat climate change after a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December fell short of a treaty.

But the G8 nations — the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada — set no new dates for reaching an accord after Copenhagen overran a 2009 deadline.

In 2010 “we will strive to achieve a fair, effective and comprehensive post-2012 agreement that includes a robust system of emissions reductions monitoring, reporting and verification,” it said.

The G8 reaffirmed a goal set in a non-binding Copenhagen Accord of limiting a rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.

“Achieving this global climate challenge requires global mitigation action,” it said, but omitted vital details of how the curbs on greenhouse gas emissions would be shared out.

It gave new support to a goal set at a G8 summit in 2008 of launching 20 large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage — trapping greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, for instance, and burying them underground.

“G8 leaders commit to take concrete actions to accelerate worldwide implementation of these projects and set a new goal to achieve this by 2015,” the statement said.

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Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64U2KB20100531?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

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Thomson Reuters

WHO sees good progress on U.N. health goals for poor

(Reuters) – Far fewer children are dying and rates of malnutrition, HIV and tuberculosis are declining thanks to good progress on health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

In its annual health report for 2010, the U.N. body said some countries had made impressive gains, although others may struggle to meet some of the 2015 targets.

“With five years remaining to the MDG deadline in 2015 there are some striking improvements,” said the report, which is based on data collected from WHO’s 193 member states.

Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Rwanda had made progress on child mortality despite facing difficulties, WHO said.

However the group said global results mask inequalities between countries, and some nations’ progress had been slowed by conflict, poor governance or humanitarian and economic crises.

The Millennium Development Goals were set in 2000 by 189 heads of state seeking to drive global policy to tackle poverty, hunger, ill-health and lack of access to clean water, among other things.

The key findings of WHO’s report were that:

* Fewer children are dying, with annual global deaths of children under five falling to 8.8 million in 2008 – down by 30 percent since 1990;

* The estimated percentage of underweight children under five has dropped from 25 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2010;

* The proportion of births attended by a skilled health worker has increased globally, but in the Africa and southeast Asia fewer than 50 percent of all births were attended;

* New HIV infections have declined by 16 percent globally from 2001 to 2008. In 2008, 2.7 million people contracted the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths;

* Existing cases of tuberculosis are declining, along with deaths among HIV-negative tuberculosis cases;

* The world is on track to achieve the MDG target on access to safe drinking water, but more needs to be done to achieve the sanitation target.

The water and sanitation goals call for the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation to be halved by 2015 from levels in 2000.

The WHO report found that the percentage of the world’s population with access to safe drinking water had increased from 77 percent to 87 percent, a rate of improvement it said would hit the MDG target if it keeps up.

“In low-income countries, however, the annual rate of increase needs to double in order to reach the target and a gap persists between urban and rural areas in many countries,” the report said.

On sanitation, the progress was less good: in 2008, 2.6 billion people had no access to a hygienic toilet and 1.1 billion were still defecating in the open, it said.

Poor sewerage can spread dangerous infections such as viral hepatitis and cholera.

The slowest improvement has been in Africa, where the percentage of the population using toilets or latrines increased from 30 percent in 1990 to 34 percent in 2008.

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6494TI20100511?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters.