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The state of the world? It is on the brink of disaster
(Steve Connor, The Independent, 30 March 2005)
Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium. . . . The report does not make jolly reading. The academics found that two-thirds of the delicately-balanced ecosystems they studied have suffered badly at the hands of man over the past 50 years. . . . The dryland regions of the world, which account for 41 per cent of the earth's land surface, have been particularly badly damaged and yet this is where the human population has grown most rapidly during the 1990s. . . . Slow degradation is one thing but sudden and irreversible decline is another. The report identifies half a dozen potential "tipping points" that could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of recovery on a human timescale. . . . Walt Reid, the leader of the report's core authors, warned that unless the international community took decisive action the future looked bleak for the next generation. "The bottom line of this assessment is that we are spending earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the natural functions of earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," Dr Reid said. . . . "At the same time, the assessment shows that the future really is in our hands. We can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently under way," he said. . . . The assessment was carried out over the past three years and has been likened to the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - set up to investigate global warming - for its expertise in the many specialisms that make up the broad church of environmental science. . . . In summary, the scientists concluded that the planet had been substantially "re-engineered" in the latter half of the 20th century because of the pressure placed on the earth's natural resources by the growing demands of a larger human population. . . . "Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber and fibre," the reports says. . . . The full costs of this are only now becoming apparent. Some 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on earth have been seriously degraded or used unsustainably - an ecosystem being defined as a dynamic complex of plants, animals and micro-organisms that form a functional unit with the non-living environment in which the coexist. . . . The scale of the changes seen in the past few decades has been unprecedented. Nearly one-third of the land surface is now cultivated, with more land being converted into cropland since 1945 than in the whole of the 18th and 19th centuries combined. . . . The amount of water withdrawn from rivers and lakes for industry and agriculture has doubled since 1960 and there is now between three and six times as much water held in man-made reservoirs as there is flowing naturally in rivers. . . . Meanwhile, the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that has been released into the environment as a result of using farm fertilisers has doubled in the same period . More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertiliser ever used on the planet has been used since 1985. . . . This sudden and unprecedented release of free nitrogen and phosphorus - important mineral nutrients for plant growth - has triggered massive blooms of algae in the freshwater and marine environments. This is identified as a potential "tipping point" that can suddenly destroy entire ecosystems. "The Millennium Assessment finds that excessive nutrient loading is one of the major problems today and will grow significantly worse in the coming decades unless action is taken," Dr Reid said. . . . Between 1960 and 2000, the world population doubled from three billion to six billion. At the same time, the global economy increased more than six-fold and the production of food and the supply of drinking water more than doubled, with the consumption of timber products increasing by more than half. . . . Meanwhile, human activity has directly affected the diversity of wild animals and plants. There have been about 100 documented extinctions over the past century but scientists believe that the rate at which animals and plants are dying off is about 1,000 times higher than natural, background levels. . . . "Humans are fundamentally and to a significant extent irreversibly changing the diversity of life on earth and most of these changes represent a loss of biodiversity," the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says. . . . The distribution of species across the world is becoming more homogenous as some unique animals and plants die out and other, alien species are introduced into areas in which they would not normally live, often with devastating impact. . . . So what can be done in a century when the human population is expected to increase by a further 50 per cent? . . . The board of directors of the Millennium Assessment said in a statement: "The overriding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all. . . . "Achieving this, however, will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making and new ways of co-operation between government, business and civil society. The warning signs are there for all of us to see. The future now lies in our hands," it said. . . . Asked what we should do now and what we should plan to do over the next 50 years, Dr Reid replied that there must be a fundamental reappraisal of how we view the world's natural resources. "The heart of the problem is this: protection of nature's services is unlikely to be a priority so long as they are perceived to be free and limitless by those using them," Dr Reid said. . . . "We simply must establish policies that require natural costs to be taken into account for all economic decisions," he added. . . . "There is a tremendous amount that can be done in the short term to reduce degradation - for example, the causes of some of the most significant problems such as fisheries collapse, climate change, and excessive nutrient loading are clear - many countries have policies in place that encourage excessive harvest, use of fossil fuels, or excessive fertilisation of crops. . . . "But as important as these short-term fixes are, over the long term humans must both enhance the production of many services and decrease our consumption of others. That will require significant investments in new technologies and significant changes in behaviour," he explained.

posted by LoZo 3:00 PM