HR: 17:40h
AN: PA24A-07    [Abstracts]
TI: Can Earth Sciences Help Alleviate Global Poverty?
AU: * Mutter, J C
EM: jcm@ldeo.columbia.edu
AF: The Earth Institute at Columbia University, 535 West 116th Steet, New York, NY 10027
AB: Poverty is not properly described solely in terms of economics. Certainly the billion people living on less than a dollar a day are the extreme poor and the two billion people who are living today on two dollars a day or less are poor also. One third of all humans live in poverty today. But poverty concerns deprivation - of good health, adequate nutrition, adequate education, properly paid employment, clean water, adequate housing and good sanitation. It is a fundamental denial of opportunity and a violation of basic human rights. Despite its prevalence and persistence of poverty and the attention given it by many scholars, the causes of poverty are not well understood and hence interventions to bring poor societies out of their condition often fail. One commonly missed component in the search for solutions to poverty is the fundamental co-dependence between the state of the Earth and the state of human well-being. These relationships, are compelling but often indirect and non-linear and sometimes deeply nuanced. They are also largely empirical in nature, lacking theory or models that describe the nature of the relationships. So while it is quite apparent that the poorest people are much more vulnerable than the rich to the Earths excesses and even to relatively small natural variations in places where the base conditions are poor, we do not presently know whether the recognized vulnerability is both an outcome of poverty and a contributing cause. Are societies poor, or held from development out of poverty because of their particular relationship to Earth's natural systems? Does how we live depend on where we live? Providing answers to these questions is one of the most fundamental research challenges of our time. That research lies in a domain squarely at the boundary between the natural and social sciences and cannot be answered by studies in either domain alone. What is clear even now, is that an understanding of the Earth gained from the natural sciences is essential and could hold the key to making gains toward alleviating the burden of global poverty.
UR: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sop2004/consensus.html
DE: 6620 Science policy
DE: 6944 Nonlinear phenomena
DE: 4215 Climate and interannual variability (3309)
DE: 1645 Solid Earth
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Public Affairs [PA]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting