UN Declares Earth is in Code Red

Save the planet? It's now or never, warns landmark UN report

Agence France-Presse, Oct. 25, 2007

NAIROBI (AFP) -- Humanity is changing Earth's climate so fast and devouring resources so voraciously that it is poised to bequeath a ravaged planet to future generations, the UN warned Thursday in its most comprehensive survey of the environment.

The fourth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4), published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is compiled by 390 experts from observations, studies and data garnered over two decades.

The 570-page report -- which caps a year that saw climate change dominate the news -- says world leaders must propel the environment "to the core of decision-making" to tackle a daily worsening crisis

"The need couldn't be more urgent and the time couldn't be more opportune, with our enhanced understanding of the challenges we face, to act now to safeguard our own survival and that of future generations," GEO-4 said.

The UNEP report offers the broadest and most detailed tableau of environmental change since the Brundtland Report, "Our Common Future," was issued in 1987 and put the environment on the world political map.

"There have been enough wake-up calls since Brundtland. I sincerely hope GEO-4 is the final one," said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

"The systematic destruction of the Earth's natural and nature-based resources has reached a point where the economic viability of economies is being challenged -- and where the bill we hand on to our children may prove impossible to pay," he added.

Earth has experienced five mass extinctions in 450 million years, the latest of which occurred 65 million years ago, says GEO-4.

"A sixth major extinction is under way, this time caused by human behaviour," it says.

Over the past two decades, growing prosperity has tremendously strengthened the capacity to understand and confront the environmental challenges ahead.

Despite this, the global response has been "woefully inadequate," the report said.

The report listed environmental issues by continent and by sector, offering dizzying and often ominous statistics about the future.

Climate is changing faster than at any time in the past 500,000 years.

Global average temperatures rose by 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.33 Fahrenheit) over the past century and are forecast to rise by 1.8 to four C (3.24-7.2 F) by 2100, it said, citing estimates issued this year by the 2007 Nobel Peace co-laureates, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

With more than six billion humans, Earth's population is now so big that "the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available," the report warned, adding that the global population is expected to peak at between eight and 9.7 billion by 2050.

"In Africa, land degradation and even desertification are threats; per capita food production has declined by 12 percent since 1981," it said.

The GEO-4 report went on to enumerate other strains on the planet's resources and biodiversity.

Fish consumption has more than tripled over the past 40 years but catches have stagnated or declined for 20 years, it said.

"Of the major vertebrate groups that have been assessed comprehensively, over 30 percent of amphibians, 23 percent of mammals and 12 percent of birds are threatened," it added.

Stressing it was not seeking to present a "dark and gloomy scenario", UNEP took heart in the successes from efforts to combat ozone loss and chemical air pollution.

But it also stressed that failure to address persistent problems could undo years of hard grind.

And it noted: "Some of the progress achieved in reducing pollution in developed countries has been at the expense of the developing world, where industrial production and its impacts are now being exported."

GEO-4 -- the fourth in a series dating back to 1997 -- also looks at how the current trends may unfold and outlines four scenarios to the year 2050: "Markets First", "Policy First", "Security First", Sustainability First".

After a year that saw the UN General Assembly devote unprecedented attention to climate change and the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC and former US vice president Al Gore for raising awareness on the same issue, the report's authors called for radical change.

"For some of the persistent problems, the damage may already be irreversible," they warned.

"The only way to address these harder problems requires moving the environment from the periphery to the core of decision-making: environment for development, not development to the detriment of environment."

Environmental failures 'put humanity at risk'

· UN report bemoans lack of urgency by governments

The Guardian (U.K.), Oct. 26, 2007

The future of humanity has been put at risk by a failure to address environmental problems including climate change, species extinction and a growing human population, according to a new UN report.

In a sweeping audit of the world's environmental wellbeing, the study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that governments are still failing to recognise the seriousness of major environmental issues.

The study, involving more than 1,400 scientists, found that human consumption had far outstripped available resources. Each person on Earth now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the planet can supply, it finds.

Meanwhile, biodiversity is seriously threatened by the impact of human activities: 30% of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are under threat of extinction, while one in 10 of the world's large rivers runs dry every year before it reaches the sea.

The report - entitled Global Environment Outlook: Environment for Development - reviews progress made since a similar study in 1987 which laid the groundwork for studying environmental issues affecting the planet.

Since the 1987 study, Our Common Future, the global response "has in some cases been courageous and inspiring," said the environment programme's executive director Achim Steiner. The international community has cut ozone-damaging chemicals, negotiated the Kyoto protocol and other international environmental treaties and supported a rise in protected areas which cover 12% of the world.

"But all too often [the response] has been slow and at a pace and scale that fails to respond to or recognise the magnitude of the challenges facing the people and the environment of the planet," Mr Steiner said. "The systematic destruction of the Earth's natural and nature-based resources has reached a point where the economic viability of economies is being challenged - and where the bill we hand to our children may prove impossible to pay," he said.

Climate change is a global priority that demands political leadership, but there has been "a remarkable lack of urgency" in the response, which the report characterised as "woefully inadequate".

The report's authors say its objective is "not to present a dark and gloomy scenario, but an urgent call to action".

It warns that tackling the problems may affect the vested interests of powerful groups, and that the environment must be moved to the core of decision-making.

The report said irreversible damage to the world's climate will be likely unless greenhouse gas emissions drop to below 50% of their 1990 levels before 2050.

To reach this level, the richer countries must cut emissions by 60% to 80% by 2050 and developing countries must also make significant reductions, it says.

It addresses a number of areas where environmental degradation is threatening human welfare and the planet, including water, over-fishing and biodiversity - where the UNEP says a sixth, human-induced, extinction is under way.

Billions of people in the developing world are put at risk by a failure to remedy relatively simple problems such as waterborne disease, the study says.

The 550-page report took five years to prepare. It was researched and drafted by almost 400 scientists, whose findings were peer-reviewed by 1,000 others.

One of the report's authors, Joseph Alcamo said that race is on to determine if leaders move fast enough to save the planet. "The question for me, for us perhaps, is whether we're going to make it to a more slowly changing world or whether we're going to hit a brick wall in the Earth's system first," he said. "Personally, I think this could be one of the most important races that humanity will ever run."

In numbers:

· 45 thousand square miles of forest are lost across the world each year

· 60% of the world's major rivers have been dammed or diverted

· 34%: the amount by which the world's population has grown in the last 20 years

· 75 thousand people a year are killed by natural disasters

· 50%: The percentage by which populations of fresh fish have declined in 20 years

· 20%: How much the energy requirements of developed countries such as the United States have increased in the period

U.N. Warns of Rapid Decay of Environment

The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2007

PARIS, Oct. 25 -- The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage to the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species, and the challenge of feeding a growing population are putting humanity at risk, the United Nations Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns, Achim Steiner, the executive director of the Environment Program, said in a telephone interview.

Many biologists and climate scientists have concluded that human activities have become a dominant influence on the Earths climate and ecosystems. But there is still a range of views on whether the changes could have catastrophic impacts, as the human population heads toward nine billion by midcentury, or more manageable results.

Over the last two decades, the world population increased by almost 34 percent, to 6.7 billion, from 5 billion. But the land available to each person is shrinking, from 19.5 acres in 1900 to 5 acres by 2005, the report said.

Population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger people, plants and animal species.

Persistent problems include a rapid rise of dead zones, where marine life no longer can be supported because pollutants like runoff fertilizers deplete oxygen.

But Mr. Steiner, of the Environment Program, did note that Western European governments had taken effective measures to reduce air pollutants and that Brazil had made efforts to roll back some deforestation. He said an international treaty to tackle the hole in the earths ozone layer had led to the phasing out of 95 percent of ozone-damaging chemicals.

Life would be easier if we didnt have the kind of population growth rates that we have at the moment, Mr. Steiner said. But to force people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer. The more realistic, ethical and practical issue is to accelerate human well-being and make more rational use of the resources we have on this planet.

Mr. Steiner said parts of Africa could reach an environmental tipping point if changing rainfall patterns turned semi-arid zones into arid zones and made agriculture much harder. He said another tipping point could occur in India and China if Himalayan glaciers shrank so much that they no longer supplied adequate amounts of water.

He also warned of a global collapse of all species being fished by 2050, if fishing around the world continued at its current pace. The report said that two and a half times more fish were being caught than the oceans could produce in a sustainable manner, and that the level of fish stocks classed as collapsed had roughly doubled over the past 20 years, to 30 percent.

In the spirit of the United Nations report, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France outlined plans on Thursday to fight climate change.

He said he would make 1 billion euros, or $1.4 billion, available over four years to develop energy sources and maintain biodiversity. He said each euro spent on nuclear research would be matched by one spent on research into clean technologies and environmental protection.

U.N. says world in dire straits

Enn.com, Reuters, Oct. 26, 2007

LONDON (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 Program'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.

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