Supplemental readings from the Reader

World Health Organization. 2002. World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life. Geneva: World Health Organization, pp. 7-14.

1.2.2 PROMOTING HUMAN WELL-BEING: Health and well-being The overall health of people has substantially improved over the last sixty years. The average life expectancy for a newborn child has been extended from 46 to 69 years over the past sixty years. Much of this improvement is from reductions in infant and child mortality for which immunization, improved water, sanitation, and nutrition have played major roles. But major health problems persist both with the spread of infectious diseases characteristic of developing countries and the chronic diseases of industrialized countries. Other measures of well-being also show improvement as adult literacy has risen over 20(?) percentage points since 1970, and GDP/capita (purchasing power parity) has more than tripled since 1960(?). Global trends, however, often mask the plight of those that are left out in a persistent poverty that is sustained by growing inequality, shrinking entitlements, and environmental services, or are denied the very opportunity of life from the AIDS pandemic and reemergent infectious diseases. A child born in Africa has 25 years less life expectancy than one in Europe, a difference that has not changed in more than a century. Narrowing that difference is a central challenge of health and well-being. The Reading identifies the ten leading risks to health, the burden of disease that they cause, cost-effective interventions that can reduce this burden, and their varying impact around the world.

Kates, R. W., and P. Dasgupta. 2007. African poverty: A grand challenge for sustainability science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(43):16747-16750.

1.2.3 PROMOTING HUMAN WELL-BEING: Affluence and poverty Extending a modicum of affluence to the poorer portions of the world and especially to the poorest of the poor is a major need. Almost 1 billion people (18%) are living on less than $1/day and 2.5 billion people (48%) on less than $2/day. As with similar figures on hunger, the proportion of most impoverished people declined in a quarter of a century by half, from two-fifths to one-fifth of the world population living on less than $1 a day. This reduction has varied by region. East Asia has made the most progress, while South Asia and Latin America have had only modest improvement. But there has been no improvement in sub-Saharan Africa where the numbers of very poor almost doubled between 1981 and 2004. Thus the principle poverty challenge in the world is that of sub-Saharan Africa, the region that has shown little or no improvement, even worsening, in all the key indices of health, well-being, food security, and economic growth. A secondary challenge is for the newly-industrializing countries such as Brazil, China, and India, to translate their rapid economic growth into improved well-being for the many poor among them. The Reading is an introduction to a set of articles focusing on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and summarizes definitions, causes, and proposed poverty polices in that region.

Dasgupta, Partha (Lead Author); S. Niggol Seo (Topic Editor). 2008. Natural capital and economic growth. In: Encyclopedia of Earth, ed. Cutler J. Cleveland. Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Enviro

1.4.1.4 HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS: Simply sketched interactions - Wealth and capital In 1995, the World Bank released a first report in which it attempted to measure wealth as three forms of capital: produced assets, natural resources, and human resources. Originally the intent was to include social capital, but this was apparently dropped given the problems of measurement. These forms of capital represent an economic approach to human-environment interactions that yield very different indicators of wealth than that of standard “goods and services.” The Reading demonstrates that an economy’s productive base includes not only its capital assets (stocks of manufactured, human, and natural capital) but also its knowledge and institutions and shows how accounting for natural capital can make a substantial difference to our conception of the development process.