Target 10: Halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Target 11: Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
The environment provides us clean air, water, plants and animals to consume and in reutrn we have to make sure that we deserve to have them by protecting and bettering its condition. Better treatment to the environment ensures regular benefits from it to increase the income and the quality and quantity of foods for poor people.
About Target 9:
Protection and sustainable management of ecosystems, their biologically diverse components, and the services they provide to the human population, are central to alleviating many of the world's most pressing concerns.
Key areas of environmental degradation: Key aspects of environmental degradation can be divided into general threats that affect all species and ecosystems, and their related services globally, and those threats that affect specific species or types of ecosystems, or all ecosystems in particular parts of the world.
General threats either directly affect the long-term viability of all species, or the functioning of all ecosystems, thereby threatening the species they contain and disabling the availability of ecosystem services they provide. One of the most important general threats is climate change. The scientific community has reached a broad consensus that climate change is now an issue of major concern. While we may see this as a "long-term" problem, the first terrestrial evidence of its current effects on the distribution of species is beginning to emerge. The effects on marine ecosystems may be even greater. No doubt all countries will be affected by climate change, but developing countries and particularly small island developing states are most vulnerable as these changes affect weather patterns, water distribution, disease incidences and fisheries in ways that stress those human populations least able to protect themselves from flooding, soil erosion, emerging epidemics, water shortages, crop failures, and coral bleaching.
About Target 10:
Water is a key to development in all its many dimensions. First and foremost, it is an important element for human survival, and the combination of safe drinking water, enough sanitation and hygiene is recognized as fundamental to human well-being. But water is also an essential element for food security, for the environment, and for continious development more generally. Indeed, water is not merely the first of the five key "WEHAB" (Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity) areas singled out for priority attention at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, but a crucial ingredient for all areas.
Water is therefore intrinsically interconnected with the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed upon by the international community in 2000. Halving "by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" is of the eighteen targets of the MDGs and was being considered as one of the most important- a recognition of the fact that over a billion of the world's people still lack safe drinking water, while over two billion have no good sanitation. As importantly, water is an essential ingredient to virtually all the other MDGs which range from eradicating extreme poverty and hunger to ensuring environmental sustainability. Although the MDG and targets focus principally on ends rather than means and therefore do not explicitly recognize water's role in food security or environmental sustainability, there is no doubt that good water management will be essential to achieving most if not all the other MDGs. Integrated Water Resources Management will be especially key to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, ensuring environmental sustainability and improving health conditions.
About Target 11:
The word slum has two uses: First, as a collective term, it involves a settlement of some scale, in which the quality of housing is of an unacceptable standard. The second use is singular - a slum is an individual urban dwelling of extremely poor quality, wherever it is situated.
There are three key considerations on achieving these target:
a. Fighting urban poverty without fighting the poor;
b. Fighting squatting, not squatters, through improved capacity in urban physical planning;
c. Recognizing gender or the specific situation of women and men as a consideration in all slum improvements strategies, plans, programs, and activities, as men and women experience slum life differently.
A differential diagnosis is clearly required of the determinants of increasing or decreasing numbers of slum dwellers in the world today and the various contexts in which slums occur (i.e., in small, medium, large, and mega-sized cities). More specifically, evidence suggests that the incidence and number of people living in slums is not necessarily reduced by faster economic growth. Indeed, a number of slums have flourished during times of significant economic growth, when labor migration pull factors went unaccompanied by adequate housing and settlements for new city residents (as was the case in Istanbul, Bangalore, Bangkok, Manila, etc.). This is an example of dysfunctional economic growth, or more specifically a process where sustained economic growth takes place without any institutional mechanisms to redistribute its benefits in a socially equitable manner. Such inequity in benefit-distribution is critically and directly linked with the quality of life of slum dwellers. In addition, it also important to note that slums of a critical size relative to the local economy can themselves hamper the true growth potential of an urban agglomeration by impairing the effectiveness and labor efficiency of significant portions of the potential working force, with serious repercussions on national growth. Indeed, although a significant surplus in the urban labor force has historically allowed for worker exploitation, that very exploitation has worked against long-term, effective, and sustainable economic growth.
