Tag: SDGs

Introduction

Posted on by Mother Earth

Mother Earth/ Gaia ‘s Blog
Earth year 4,492,056,017

Mankind, My children!

Please listen to my story. I was born 4.5 billion years ago and for most of my life I was a lonely, barren and uninhabited rock floating through space. Then a miracle happened and to my great joy, I gradually changed into a planet with my land, oceans and air teaming with life and vegetation and all living eco systems in harmonious balance. I was delighted and proud to be a mother to such profusion of life and to become known throughout the Universe as the “blue” planet.

Mankind taking over the world

Photo: Courtesy of WWF

If the whole of my history to date was shown as 1 single hour, then in just the last few seconds of that hour, you, Mankind, were born and because of your energy and intelligence you became my favourites. I let you dominate, bully and exploit my other children, did not discipline you enough when you were young, did not teach you right from wrong and continually made excuses for your bad behaviour and kept forgiving you. As a result, I now see that I spoiled you. You came to think that the whole of Earth and its resources were yours for the taking and that no one else mattered. In your greed and uncaring way, you took whatever you wanted without ever asking for my permission or thinking about the consequences of your actions on other species sharing the planet and even on yourselves. That is why I am now writing to you as individuals directly to try to explain the problem more clearly and to show you what needs to be done to nurse me and your species back to health.

Did you know that

  • About 66 million primary school children attend classes hungry and 795 million people around the world are undernourished while 1.3 billion tonnes of food ends of rotting in bins or spoiling worldwide?
  • More than 1 billion people do not have access to fresh water and at least 1.8 billion people have to use drinking water that is polluted with human toilet waste?
  • One in 10 persons lives on less than $1.90 per day and 736 million people still live in extreme poverty?
  • Each day 1000 children die due to preventable water and sanitation related diarrhea diseases ?

What can YOU do?

Each week, for the next few weeks, I will give you some basic facts and information about one of the major problems facing both of us and which will influence our survival. In particular, I will challenge you each day and ask What can you do? (get used to this expression and challenge. This will be abbreviated to and pronounced as WCYDo (wich – ee – do) and I will be using this a lot in coming blogs!). After giving you some facts, I will suggest a number of simple actions that you, your family and friends can do to contribute to a solution. Please encourage others to befriend me and read my blogs and pass on the facts and proposed actions to all your family, friends and acquaintances. Ask them to then pass these on to their friends and acquaintances with the same instructions so that we can multiply the efforts to maximise our impact and to build a movement to take effective action to save us both.

Our work will start next week and tell others to join us to view these blog posts and to visit us on Facebook and Twitter to sign up for our newsletter and follow us. Get ready!

3. Health and Well-being

3. Health and Well-being

Posted on by Mother Earth

SDG 3, Health and Well-being

Earth year 4,492,056,017
Mother Earth/ Gaia‘s Blog

Mankind, My children

In my first blog post (week 1,  blog post 1 – Introduction) I asked that you commit to following my blogs for the next few weeks to give me a chance to explain the most important issues affecting our joint survival. Subsequent Blogs have started to give you some facts about the big and important Global issues that need to be addressed and what sorts of actions you should take. In today’s blog post I want to talk about SDG 3 – HEALTH and WELL-BEING.

The problem

By USAID Africa Bureau (Health care for sick babies Uploaded by Elitre) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Health activities over the last 15 years have had some successes but there is still much to do. Since 2000 the chances of mothers dying in childbirth has reduced by half but in developing countries the maternal death rates are still 14 times higher than in developed countries. Measles vaccines have averted over 15 million deaths but children born into poverty are still twice as likely to die before they reach age 5. AIDS remains a major problem. By 2018 there were 37.9 million with HIV / AIDS of which 1.7 million were children under 15. Although there have been improvements in recent years, HIV is the leading cause of death worldwide for women of reproductive age. An estimated 50 adolescent girls die every day from AIDS-related illnesses. And each day, some 460 adolescent girls become infected with HIV.

Do you feel pity when watching TV reports about the poor health facilities and suffering of the poor in developing countries who have no access to health services and cannot afford medicines? Do you feel sorry for them? Have you ever thought about what YOU might do to help make the world a better place where such persons might be helped? Now is your chance to do something to change the world!

The facts

  1. 6 million children die before they reach 5 years of age
  2. Children born into poverty are twice as likely to die before they are 5
  3. Child born to an educated mother 50% more likely to survive to reach 5 years
  4. 22 million people with HIV have no access lifesaving medicines

WCYDo (What Can You Do?)

  1. Share the facts about Global health to family and friends to encourage action
  2. Support health charities working in developing countries, such as internationalmedicalcorps.org, www.doctorswithoutborders.org, www.hki.org, www.pih.org
  3. Write to your politicians asking what your country is doing to help on this topic.

Encourage others to join us and to visit our social accounts to sign up for our newsletter and information about our proposed WCYDo APP. See you next week on blog post 5, which will be about SDG 4 – Education.