Chapter 1: Regional Priorities and Drivers of Change
1.1 The GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Latin America and the Caribbean: a call for action
T
he Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region has more than 5 million square kilometres of arable land; 20 per cent of the world´s proven oil reserves (Walter
2016); 23 per cent of the world’s forest areas; between 60 and 70 per cent of all life forms on Earth; receives 29 per cent of the world’s rainfall, and about 30 per cent of the world’s renewable water resources, which also represent some 70 per cent of the entire American continent’s reserves (FAO 2015a, FAO 2015b). The Caribbean, in particular, has an excellent recreational climate, which is vital in an age when travel tourism has become the world’s largest and fastest- growing economic sector (IDB 2016).
The wide range of biodiversity, including ecosystems, and other assets such as minerals and land found in the region, offer opportunities and the potential to support livelihoods and a good quality of life to its population of over 600 million people at all scales well into the future.
Since the preparation of the last GEO LAC in 2010 (UNEP 2010a), population growth remains a strong driver for the region. LAC’s population has increased by almost 50 million people during the last 6 years reaching 626 million in 2015. The process of urbanization continues with an increase in urban populations from 79 per cent in 2010 to 80 per cent in 2015 (UNECLAC 2015b). During the last ten years, 15 cities moved from small to medium size (from 52 in 2005 to 67 today); and 2 new names were added to the list of megacities in LAC: Bogotá and Lima (with 9.7 and 9.8 million inhabitants respectively). There was a decrease in the number of people living in slums from 117 million to 110 million between 2008 and 2014 (UN 2015). Additionally, 96.2 per cent of the urban population in LAC now has access to drinking water (compared to 92 per cent in 2006); and 86 per cent have access to improved sanitation services (compared to 78 per cent in 2006).
Credit: Shutterstock/Videowokart 13
In general, despite the fact that Latin America and the Caribbean is still the region with the highest level of inequity in the world (around 0.5 Gini index), there is a clear trend towards poverty reduction. While in 2009 35.1 per cent of the total population in the region was living in poverty (17 per cent in extreme poverty), in only five years, that proportion was reduced to 26.7 per cent (UNECLAC 2013). However, as in other regions of the world, the overall GDP growth rate in LAC is slowing down, from 4.2 per cent in 2011 to 0.9 per cent in 2014 but with diverging developments across the region (World Bank 2015).
While there has been important progress across the region in achieving several of the targets set out under the Millennium Development Goals (UN 2015), it cannot be ignored that many of the region’s environmental assets are under increasing pressure from multiple drivers of change, including climate change and endogenous and exogenous socio-economic factors. Failure to address these issues - such as the loss of critical ecosystems; increasing GHG emissions; species loss, and deterioration of natural sources of water, inter alia - will undermine the very basis upon which so much of the region’s activity is dependent. This ultimately increases the vulnerability of the societies of Latin America and the Caribbean, and will likely have a profound impact on progressive economic and social growth in the future.
The recently adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development provides the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean with an opportunity to realign and strengthen their efforts to achieve greater prosperity in a more inclusive manner and within the capacity of the region’s life support system. This process, initiated in 2000 by the Millennium Development Goals and transitioned to the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, offers a new framework for the effective mainstreaming of environmental considerations into the economic and social dimensions of development. There is tremendous scope for governments to build on efforts already in place, given that there are many successful
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