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August 24, 2003
Review: Environmental knowledge
MASSIVE flooding has led to loss of life and property in Sindh due to heavy monsoons in July. The Prime Minister has announced Rs20 million as relief package for the Hyderabad district. Such losses on a local or regional level are due to the erratic climatic patterns caused increasingly due to global warming and other man-made problems. Environmental disturbances caused by human activities are expected to increase, with poorer countries likely to suffer the brunt. And here, the poorest communities are the worst affected.
Statistics in Vital Signs 2003 show losses from weather-related damage and losses to total $53 billion worldwide in 2002. And in 1999 these were a record $100 billion. Such unprecedented losses of the last decade continue. Heavy rains in Kenya displaced 150,000 people, while 800,000 people in China suffered from serious drought. In 2002, global average temperature reached the second highest level ever, following a global warming trend that is believed to be due to fossil fuel burning.
It is obvious that poverty and environmental degradation exacerbate the effect of natural disasters. The health of the planet is dependent on reducing excessive consumption and attending to the needs of the poor. No longer can the rich countries close their eyes to the sufferings elsewhere that are caused largely by their greed, but have now come to haunt them in this interconnected world.
When he was eight, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute was fascinated by how the shipwrecked Swiss Family Robinson survived on indigenous and animals and crops. He now studies the limits to world agriculture at the institute he founded. He started off as a farmer, a fact I learnt at his eloquent lecture to a packed hall of an environment conference in Washington DC in the 1990s. Vital Signs is one from a family of publications produced by Lester Brown’s institute, and one that he edited at its start. There is also the State of the World, a flagship annual publication, as well as the frequent Worldwatch papers that cover their subject in 50-70 pages and World Watch a lively bimonthly magazine.
The format of the slim, compact, hard-hitting Vital Signs remains virtually unchanged since the first issue appeared in 1992. The edition under review, like the earlier ones has two parts. Part One covers six main indicators, with several sub-indicators — almost the same in the older edition. Current indicators are: food; energy and atmosphere; economy; transportation and communication; heath and social; military. Under each of these are two to four sub-indicators. Each of these takes two pages: the first is qualitative supported by a second with well-designed graphs and tables.
Part Two focuses on “Special features”. These include environmental features (bird species declining due to destruction of their habitat; small islands threatened by sea level rise); economy and finance features (rich-poor divide growing; differential in CEO-workers pay widening; severe weather events); resource economic features (persistence of high farm subsidies; continuing high harvesting of illegal drugs); health and social features (number of refugees drop; alternative medicine gains popularity; maternal deaths reflect inequities; consumption patterns contribute to mortality; AIDS and increase in orphans); military and governance feature (corruption thwarts development; international criminal court starts work; military expenditure on the rise; resource wars plague developing world).
The fact and analysis presented in the book are gleaned from a range of sources all of which are carefully listed in the extensive notes section at the end.
Among the important trends highlighted in Vital Signs 2003:
• Infectious diseases kill twice as many people worldwide as cancer each year.
• Roughly one-quarter of the 50 recent wars and armed conflicts have involved a struggle for control of natural resources.
• The most rapidly expanding energy source is wind power-with an annual average growth rate of 33 per cent between 1998 and 2002.
• 82 per cent of the world’s smokers now live in developing countries.
The editor of this work from its inception, as for many other Worldwatch publications is Linda Stark. Interestingly she edited Pakistan’s National Conservation Strategy document in the early 1990s. In Vital Signs, the only mention of data about Pakistan is in the table of corrupt countries as assessed by Transparency International — a foreign organization doing its own data gathering and analysis. We must demand that national environmental and socio-political data gathering be made reliable, and that data and analysis be made easily accessible to every citizen as well as institutes such as Worldwatch.
Vital Signs and similar publications need to be made available in all national languages at affordable prices. This would encourage countrywide discussion on all environmental issues — local, national, regional and global, which are now so interrelated.
Vital Signs 2003: The Trends that Shape Our Future
By Michael Renner et al
Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC-20036-1094, USA Tel: (202) 452 1999
Email: wwpub@worldwatch.org
ISBN 0-393-32440-0
153pp. $14.95
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