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Earth A Live: At a critical crossroads
“The planet is at a critical crossroad,” concludes the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Global Environment Outlook 3 (GEO-3) report. The choices made today will be critical for the forests, oceans, rivers, mountains, wildlife and other life support systems upon which current and future generations depend.
The study — a collaboration between UNEP and some 1,000 individuals and 40 institutions around the world — is the most authoritative assessment to date of where we have been, where we have reached, and where we are likely to go. It provided an opportune brief for the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa (August 26-September 4, 2002). It gives an overview of the main environmental developments over the past three decades — and of how social, economic and other factors have contributed to the changes that have occurred.
Though the world has made great strides in placing the environment on the agenda, the twin evils of poverty and excessive consumption continue to put enormous pressures upon it. GEO-3 breaks new ground by using scenario analysis to explore the environmental outlook, giving an array of alternative futures that provide insight on where events could lead us, depending on different policy approaches.
The report identifies key areas for action to ensure the success of sustainable development. Prime among them are alleviating poverty, reducing excessive consumption, reducing the debt burden of developing countries, and ensuring adequate governance structures and funding for the environment. UNEP is convinced that it lies well within the scope of human determination and ingenuity to come up with appropriate policy packages and use them to ensure that fundamental environmental conditions will get steadily better, not stealthily worse.
Now, at a glance our planet today
Forests and biodiversity
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that forests have declined by 2.4 per cent since 1990. The loss and fragmentation of forests, wetlands and mangroves have increased the pressures on the world’s wildlife. Twelve per cent of the world’s birds and nearly a quarter of its mammals are currently regarded as globally threatened. By the end of the year 2000 about 2 per cent of forests had been certified for sustainable forest management and the total extent of protected areas, such as national parks, had more than quadrupled since 1970, from 2.78 to 12.19 million square kilometres.
Atmosphere
Depletion of the ozone layer has reached record levels. In September 2000, the ozone hole over Antarctica covered more than 28 million square kilometres. Yet between the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 and the year 2000, the total consumption of ozone depleting chemicals was cut by 85 per cent, and the ozone layer is expected to recover to pre-1980 levels by the middle of this century.
Meanwhile concentrations in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide now stand at 370 parts per million, 30 per cent higher than in pre-industrial times, and concentrations of other such gases, including methane and halocarbons, have also risen. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, industrialized nations are required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 5 per cent from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
Land Around 2 billion hectares of soil — 15 per cent of the Earth’s land, and an area bigger than the United States and Canada combined — is now classed as degraded because of human activities. One sixth of this is either ‘strongly’ or ‘extremely’ degraded.
Freshwater
The proportion of the world’s people with improved water supplies increased from 79 to 82 per cent over the 1990s. But around 1.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.4 billion to improved sanitation. Diarrhoea kills about 2.2 million people a year, equivalent to 20 jumbo jets crashing every day. Some 80 countries — with 40 per cent of the Earth’s population — were suffering serious water shortages by the mid-1990s and about half of the world’s rivers are seriously depleted and polluted.
Coastal and marine areas
By 1994, an estimated 37 per cent of the world’s people were living within 60 kilometres of the coast — more people than were alive on the whole planet in 1950. Marine contamination may be costing nearly $13 billion a year in terms of human disease and ill health. Just under a third of the world’s fish stocks are now ranked as depleted, overexploited or recovering as a result of overfishing fuelled by subsidies estimated at up to $20 billion a year.
(Compiled by Samina Iqbal, who works in Communications for IUCN-The World Conservation Union, Pakistan.)
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