No fight against poverty can succeed if the climate, air, water, soil and biodiversity on which everyone depends are endangered. So the environment is central to all the Millennium Development Goals. It also has one of its own, Goal 7 - Ensure environmental sustainability, but progress on it has been patchy. There have been successes in increasing protected areas, in reducing emissions of the CFCs that attack the ozone layer, and in bringing clean water - and, to a lesser extent, sanitation - to people living in towns and cities. But forests are still shrinking in most parts of the world, slums continue to fester, not enough is being done to combat global warming and people in the countryside of developing countries still lack water and sanitation.