A report (home page) was released last week by the United Nations Environment Programme on the current state of the environment and what, if anything, countries are doing to avert damage. It is not a hopeful picture. This Herald-Sun article from 8/6 provides a summary (you would think that such an important topic would make headlines, but it was hidden away back on page 43):
Earth in danger zone
Critical thresholds being exceeded
THE Earth’s environmental systems “are being pushed towards their biophysical limits”, the United Nations Environment Program says.
The agency’s 525-page report on the health of the planet paints a grim picture.
It says: “Several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded. Abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the lifesupport functions of the planet are likely to occur.”
The report, released yesterday, says changes include rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, and the collapse of fisheries.
The report, which compiles three years of work by 300 scientists, says about 20 per cent of vertebrate species are under threat of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38 per cent since 1980, green house gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, and 90 percent of water and fish samples are contaminated by pesticides.
It says little or no progress has been made over the past five years on almost a third of the main environmental goals, including global warming. Significant progress has been made on just four of the 90 most important goals, the report says.
“This is an indictment,” UNEP executive director Achim Steiner told a news conference in Rio De Janeiro. “We live in an age of irresponsibility that is also testified and documented in this report. In 1992 (when the first of the agency’s five reports was released) we talked about the future that was likely to occur. This report 20 years later (says) … a number of the things that we talked about in the future tense in 1992 have arrived. Once the tipping point occurs, you don’t wake up the next morning and say, ‘This is terrible, can we change it?’. We are condemning people to not having the choice.”
Dr Steiner said: “Change is possible. Given what we know, we can move in another direction.”
The report was released in the run-up to the UN Rio+20 conference on June 20 and 21.
A few reactions: “We’re breaking our planet once and for all, warn scientists”, io9; “Irreversible”, MetaFilter post; “Earth could reach ecological tipping point by 2025”, Population Matters. This article links to a similar report in Nature journal (also: “Earth summit: Rio report card” there). (Annoyingly it is subscriber-access only. Surely they could make such an important report free-access?)
The reports state that Earth’s various ecologies will reach a “tipping point” before this century’s end with possibly dire consequences for the lifeforms here. If it comes to pass, many species will go extinct, forests will be decimated, the oceans will be toxic waste dumps. In effect, the grim barren Earth depicted in Avatar will become reality. The article linked back in my 31/3 entry, “Here’s a view of the world at 2050 – if you dare to look”, also is worth a re-read.
The July U.S. edition of Popular Science, featuring a “Future of the Environment” special, has a diagram showing four possible futures depending upon the choices made now, reproduced below:
Is all this doom-mongering, crying wolf? A lot of people will think so and dismiss it, as they have global warming, as there are so many more pressingly immediate issues – keeping their job, paying off mortgages and bills, all the minutiae of daily life. As individuals there seems to be little we can do, so we shrug it off and carry on as usual. Nations are locked into the same destructive path of consumption and endless economic growth, and lack the will to change. If the dire predictions come to pass (and for the sake of other lifeforms here, one hopes they do not), humanity can’t say it was not warned.
