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Wake-up call on environment

Friday, April 8th 2005

Even as disaster preparedness organisations are meeting in
Trinidad and Tobago to coordinate their responses to future
crises against the backdrop of the devastation caused by
Hurricane Ivan, the world at large is being called upon to
consider what has been described as "the most comprehensive
survey ever into the state of the planet".

Titled the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, it was drawn up
by 1,300 researchers from 95 countries over the last four
years and while its contents should be required reading of
world leaders everywhere Trinbagonians should feel a special
connection to it since the co-chair of the Assessment Panel is
none other than Independent Senator, Angela Cropper.

Funded by the Global Environment Facility, the United
Nations Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,
the World Bank and others, the exercise cost some 20 million
pounds sterling to put together what is a stark warning that
"human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain
future generations".

According to the report the way society obtains its
resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading
the natural processes that support life on Earth and this will
compromise efforts to address hunger, poverty and improve
health care.

Among specific pointers that the planet is under
unrelenting pressure are these: fully 60 per cent of world
ecosystem services have been degraded; of 24 evaluated
ecosystems, 15 are being damaged; about 20 per cent of corals
were lost in a mere 20 years, with 20 per cent degraded and
species extinction is now 100-1000 times above what has been
estimated to be the normal rate.

The assessment takes up all of 2,500 pages and "is
intended," according to a BBC report, "to inform global policy
initiatives. In many ways, it mirrors the work of the
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that has
driven efforts to slow global warming". But even as ordinary
men and women, Trinbagonians included, insist that they see
and feel the traditional climate they have known change before
their eyes, there remain people, including world leaders, who
for varying reasons insist on turning both a blind eye and a
deaf ear.

The question that arises, therefore, is whether it is not
too late and that while, as Mrs Cropper is quoted as saying,
strategic, targeted and fundamental "interventions" can go
some way in, if not pulling the planet back, at least halting
the free fall, is whether the human family has the will, or
even the desire, to intervene if not to save themselves then,
certainly, theirs and their children's children.

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