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State of the World 1999 Press Release The bright promise of a new century is clouded by unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world, according to a special millennial edition of the State of the World report, released by the Worldwatch Institute today. "In a globally interconnected economy, rapid deforestation, falling water tables, and accelerating climate change could undermine economies around the world in the decades ahead," said Lester Brown and Christopher Flavin, lead authors of the new report. During the past century, world population grew by more than 4 billion-three times the number of people when the century began. At the same time, the use of energy and raw materials grew more than ten times. "These trends cannot continue for many more years," said the authors. "As the 21st century approaches, the big question is whether we can muster the ingenuity to change-and do so rapidly enough to stave off environmentally-based economic decline. The one thing we can say for sure is that the 21st century will be as different from the 20th as that one was from the 19th." The 20th century began with extraordinary optimism. Major advances such as widespread electric lighting and the emancipation of women were widely predicted, but many other developments, such as air travel and the birth-control pill, were not. The darkest developments of the 20th century, including two world wars and more than a billion people living in poverty, were completely unexpected. Today, at the dawn of a new century, faith in technology and human progress are as common as they were a century ago. In their fascination with information technologies, many of today's economic thinkers seem to have forgotten that our modern civilization, like its forerunners, is entirely dependent on its ecological foundations-foundations that the economy is now eroding. Since our emergence as a species, human societies have continually run up against local environmental limits that have caused them to collapse, as local forests and cropland were overstressed. But the advances in technology that have allowed us to surmount these local limits have transferred the problem of environmental limits to the global level, where human activities now threaten planetary systems. Among the problems we now face: * World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades, but no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production, which is projected to peak within the next few decades. * While protein demands are projected to also double in the century ahead, no respected marine biologist expects the oceanic fish catch, which has plateaued over the last decade, to double. The world's oceans are being pushed beyond the breaking point, due to a lethal combination of pollution and over-exploitation. Eleven of the 15 most important oceanic fisheries and 70 percent of the major fish species are now fully or over-exploited, according to experts. And more than half the world's coral reefs are now sick or dying. * Growing stress can also be seen in the world's woodlands, where the clearing of tropical forests has contributed recently to unprecedented fires across large areas of Southeast Asia, the Amazon, and Central America. In Indonesia alone, 1,100 airline flights were canceled, and billions of dollars of income were lost. * Environmental deterioration is taking a growing toll on a wide range of living organisms. Of the 242,000 plant species surveyed by the World Conservation Union in 1997, some 33,000, or 14 percent, are threatened with extinction-mainly as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads, and industries. This mass extinction is projected to disrupt nature's ability to provide essential ecosystem services, ranging from pollination to flood control. * The atmosphere is also under assault. The billions of tons of carbon that have been released since the Industrial Revolution have pushed atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to their highest level in 160,000 years-a level that continues to rise each year. As scientists predicted, temperatures are rising along with the concentration of carbon dioxide. The latest jump in 1998 left the global temperature at its highest level since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Higher temperatures are projected to threaten food supplies in the next century, while more severe storms cause economic damage, and rising seas inundate coastal cities. * The early costs of climate change may already be evident: weather-related economic damages of $89 billion in 1998 exceeded losses for the decade of the 1980s. In Central America, 11,000 people were killed by Hurricane Mitch, and Honduras suffered losses equivalent to one-third of its annual GDP. * Human societies may also face growing stress in the new century. In Africa, for example, where populations have doubled in the last three decades, economic growth is already failing to keep up with human needs. Several African countries, including Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, where 20-25 percent of the adult population is now HIV-positive, are expected to lose one-fifth or more of their people within the next few decades. This could undermine their societies in the same way the plague did those of Europe in the Middle Ages. "Our analysis shows that we are entering a new century with an economy that cannot take us where we want to go," said Worldwatch President Lester Brown. "Satisfying the projected needs of 8 billion or more people with the economy we now have is simply not possible. The western industrial model-the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that so dramatically raised living standards in this century-is in trouble." The shift to an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a transition as the Industrial Revolution. But just as our great-grandparents were able to change a century ago, so must we be ready to change again. In fact, the broad outlines of a sustainable economic system that can meet the human needs of the next century are beginning to emerge. The foundation of such a system is a new design principle-one that shifts from the one-time depletion of natural resources to an economy that is based on renewable energy and that continually reuses and recycles materials. A sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based, reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land, and materials much more efficiently and wisely than we do today. Defenders of today's industries point to the costs of environmental protection. But reversing the environmental deterioration that has marked the 20th century is hardly a luxury. Archaeologists study the remains of civilizations that undermined their ecological support systems. The Fertile Crescent, where agriculture emerged over ten millennia ago, was turned into a virtual desert by ancient farmers and herders-and even today, supports only a small population. These societies found themselves on a growth path that was environmentally unsustainable-and were not able to make the economic adjustments needed to avoid a collapse. Unfortunately, the records do not tell us whether these civilizations did not understand the need for change, or whether they saw the problem but could not agree on the steps needed to stave off economic decline. Today, the adjustments we must make are clear. The question is whether we can make them in time. Building an environmentally sustainable world economy depends on a cooperative global effort. No country acting alone can protect the diversity of life on Earth or the health of oceanic fisheries. So far, national governments have largely failed to effectively implement the last decade's landmark environmental treaties-on climate change and biodiversity. One of the big challenges of the early 21st century will be to fulfill their ambitious promises to stabilize the climate and slow the destruction of species. In the absence of a concerted effort by the wealthy to address the problems of poverty and deprivation, building a sustainable future may not be possible. Growing poverty, and the political and economic chaos that can be provoked by it, reverberate around the world, as was seen in 1998 with the Asian economic meltdown, which pushed tens of millions of people below the poverty line in just a few months. Meeting the needs of the more than 1 billion people now in poverty is essential to making the transition to an environmentally sustainable world economy. "One question facing humanity as the new century approaches is whether we can find a new understanding and values that will support a restructuring of the global economy," said author Christopher Flavin. "Although such a transformation may seem farfetched, the end-of-the-century perspective offers hope. Just as the 19th century was marked by the abolition of slavery and the 20th century by a new international principle of human rights (adopted by the United Nations in 1948), the 21st century will require a new ethic of sustainability that includes the need to live within our ecological means. We will need a new set of human responsibilities-to the natural world and to future generations-to go with our newfound human rights." One key to reversing environmental degradation is to tax the activities that cause it, according to the report. By putting a price on these activities, the market can be harnessed to spur progress. If coal burning is taxed, solar energy becomes more economically competitive. If auto emissions are taxed, cleaner forms of transportation become more affordable. The new German government, elected in October 1998, has embarked on the world's most ambitious environmental tax reform-reducing taxes on wages by 2.4 percent, while raising energy taxes by an identical amount. This is a landmark step that will push Europe's largest economy in an environmentally sustainable direction. In the last decade of the 20th century, Europe is also leading the way in some of the industries that are the foundations of a solar economy. Europe has added 5,000 megawatts of wind power in the last 5 years, for example, half of it in Germany, where the northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein gets 15 percent of its electricity from the wind. Wind power, now one of Europe's fastest growing manufacturing industries, employs thousands of workers. Sales of other new energy technologies are soaring as well. The production of solar photovoltaic cells has doubled in the last five years, propelled in part by the Japanese government's efforts to promote solar rooftops as a standard option for new suburban homes. Fuel cells, which turn hydrogen into electricity with water the only byproduct, are meanwhile being spurred by billions of dollars of investment capital, as companies pursue them as a replacement for everything from the coal-fired power plant to the internal combustion engine. The effort to replace today's unsustainable economy with one that is suited to the demands of the 21st century will create some of the new century's largest investment opportunities. Bill Ford, the incoming Chairman of the Ford Motor Company, has plans to increase his company's profits by replacing the internal combustion engine that was at the center of his great-grandfather's success. "Smart companies will get ahead of the wave," says Ford. "Those that don't will be wiped out." The challenge now is to mobilize public support for a fundamental economic transformation-a shift to a 21st century economy that is far less resource intensive and polluting, yet even more productive than today's. "No challenge is greater, or more satisfying, than building an environmentally sustainable global economy, one where economic and social progress can continue, not only in the 21st century, but for many centuries beyond," the authors conclude. -END- *********************************** State of the World 1999, ISBN: 0-393-31815-X, is available
for the following prices: ********************************************* 3. Hilary French op-ed on eco-isolationism as published in
the Eco-Isolationism Hurts the Environment When a last-minute deal was struck a year ago in contentious climate change talks in Kyoto, Japan, environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief. It soon became clear that celebration was premature. With the ink not yet dry on the Kyoto accord, U.S. senators were already pledging to block ratification of the agreement. The Clinton administration bowed to this reality by agreeing not to submit the protocol for a vote until the Senators' demands that key developing countries be brought into the accord are met. Argentina and Kazakhstan broke with other developing countries at the recent meeting in Buenos Aires of the conference of the parties to the climate treaty, and agreed to accept voluntary emissions targets. But populous countries such as China and India showed no inclination to follow suit. There is thus little chance that the accord will even be put to a vote in the U.S. Senate before the presidential election in 2000. The problems plaguing the Kyoto protocol are just the latest example of a larger pattern of American eco-isolationism. Environmental threats rank increasingly high as international security issues, yet the United States is widely seen as a laggard rather than a leader in the international environmental arena. The Kyoto protocol was a follow-on to the Convention on Climate Change, a product of the June 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro under United Nations auspices. The other major accord reached in Rio, the Convention on Biological Diversity, has so far failed to pass muster with the U.S. Senate, although 174 other countries have approved it. Recent warnings from leading scientists that we are in the midst of an era of mass extinction of species underscore the urgent need to translate this accord from words into action. The Rio summit also set in motion negotiations for a treaty on desertification that is intended to prevent the further degradation of arid lands, usually as a result of poor agricultural practices, overgrazing or deforestation. More than a billion hectares of arid lands are already degraded worldwide, an area greater in size than China. Hundreds of millions of people suffer the consequences, which can include malnutrition, forced migration and economic ruin. The United States has so far refused to join the 144 countries that have become parties to this accord since it was completed in early 1994. President Bill Clinton used his trip to Africa in the spring to urge the Senate to ratify the desertification treaty, but the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Jesse Helms, failed to bring the accord forward for a vote. The United States has also not yet joined the 128 countries that have ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, or the 122 countries that are party to the 1989 Basel convention on the export of hazardous wastes. Recent polls indicate that the Senate's eco-isolationist stance does not reflect public opinion. On global warming, for example, a Harris Poll found that 74 percent of Americans who knew about the Kyoto protocol said they approve it. Other polls have found a high level of public support for cooperating through the United Nations to combat shared threats. The business community is of mixed mind when it comes to international environmental engagement. Strong business opposition can stop environmental treaties in their tracks, but a growing number of American companies are beginning to understand that their interests are better served when the United States has a seat at the international table. Charles Johnson, president of the seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred International, said in calling for ratification of the biodiversity treaty in hearings before the Senate Finance Committee: "This is too important a treaty ... to have our government on the sidelines as protocols are negotiated." In a similar vein, British Petroleum and Shell have recently withdrawn from the obstructionist Global Climate Coalition. Successful environmental diplomacy requires a cooperative, multilateral approach rather than the unilateral model that predominated during the Cold War. The U.S. Congress must accept this reality if America is to play a leading role on the international environmental stage and if the world is to stave off catastrophic environmental damage. The writer, vice president for research at the Worldwatch
Institute, a nongovernmental monitoring group, contributed this comment to the
International Herald Tribune. |
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Copyright (c) 1998 Worldwatch Institute, All Rights Reserved Published by: Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036, 202-452-1999 http://www.worldwatch.org This publication may be freely copied or retransmitted provided it remains intact and without changes. No partial display, partial retransmission, or partial duplication in any medium, including BBS, Intranet, Internet Email, or website duplication, is permitted without the attachment of this copyright notice. Any partial duplication unaccompanied by this copyright notice will be considered a copyright infringement. Worldwatch Institute
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