20 years on, world in dire straits, U.N. says
Pastor Dale Morgan
20 years on, world in dire straits, U.N. says*
25 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Two decades after a landmark report sounded
alarm bells about the state of the planet and called for urgent action
to change direction, the world is still in dire straits, a U.N. agency
said on Thursday.
While the U.N. Environment Programme's fourth Global Environment Outlook
(GEO-4) says action has been successfully taken in some regions and on
some problems, the overall picture is one of sloth and neglect.
"The global trends on climate, on ozone, on indeed ecosystem
degradation, fisheries, in the oceans, water supplies ... are still
pointing downwards," UNEP head Achim Steiner said in a short film
accompanying the report's release.
The 540-page report calls for emissions of climate warming greenhouse
gases to be cut by between 60 and 80 percent, and notes that 60 percent
of the world's ecosystems have been degraded and are still being used
unsustainably.
"We are facing an escalating situation. Partly because we have been very
slow in reversing the degradation that we have documented and secondly
because the demands on our planet have continued to grow during this
period," Steiner said.
"That equation cannot hold for much longer. Indeed, in parts of the
world it is no longer holding," he added.
The report is a litany of planet-wide death and degradation.
Two decades after former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland warned
that the survival of humankind was at stake, GEO-4 finds that three
million people die needlessly each year from water-borne diseases in
developing nations -- mostly children under five.
EXTINCTIONS
Fishing capacity is nearly four times more than is sustainable, species
are becoming extinct 100 times faster than fossil records show, and 12
percent of birds, 23 percent of mammals and over 30 percent of
amphibians face extinction.
UNEP deputy head Marion Cheatle told a London news conference the world
had suffered five mass extinctions in its history and was now undergoing
a sixth.
The report, drawn together by 388 scientists and vetted by 1,000 others,
praises international treaties on saving the ozone layer,
desertification and biodiversity and actions in some cities on urban
atmospheric pollution.
But it describes as "woefully inadequate" the global response to
problems such as cutting emissions of carbon gases from power and
transport that scientists say will boost average temperatures by up to
four degrees Celsius this century.
"We do have solutions but we are just not applying them at the speed we
need," said Cheatle. "Time and again we see not enough effort being put in."
Region by region the report highlights the good and the bad -- and in
most cases the bad is winning.
In Africa it is land degradation exacerbated by climate change and
conflicts, while in the Asia and Pacific air pollution is the major
threat to life and in Europe it is profligate consumption and overuse of
carbon-based energy.
In Latin America it is massive social inequality and deforestation,
while in North America it is rising carbon emissions and urban sprawl
and in the Middle East it is wars, poverty and growing water scarcity.
But all is not gloom and doom.
This year has been the one in which a combination of politics, natural
events and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change established a
momentum to fight global warming.
Steiner hopes that his report will have the same effect on the fight to
save the planet's ecosystems.
"Our hope is that with this GEO-4 report UNEP can in a sense help to
bring about a tipping point, just as we are seeing in 2007 with climate
change," he said.