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SOUTH AFRICA

We're
heading for disaster, warn world's leading
boffins

Humans are slowly destroying the Earth

March 31, 2005

By Steve
Connor

Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people
should no longer take it for granted that their children and
grandchildren will survive in the environmentally-degraded world of
the 21st century.

This is not the doom-laden talk of green
activists, but the considered opinion of 1 300 leading scientists
from 95 countries.

They have just published a detailed
assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new
millennium.

The academics found that two-thirds of the
delicately balanced ecosystems they studied have suffered badly at
the hands of man over the past 50 years

'The ability of ecosystems to
sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted'

.

The dryland regions of the world, which
account for about 41% of the Earth's land surface, have been
particularly badly damaged. Despite that, this is where the human
population has grown most rapidly during the 1990s.

Slow
degradation is one thing, but sudden and irreversible decline is
another. The report identifies six potential "tipping points" that
could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of
recovery on a human timescale.

And even if this slow and
inexorable degradation does not lead to total environmental
collapse, the poorest people of the world are still going to suffer
the most, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which
drew on 22 national science academies from around the
world.

Walt Reid, the leader of the report's core authors,
warned that, unless the international community takes decisive
action, the future looks bleak for the next generation

'We cannot maintain high standards
of living, let alone relieve poverty, if we don't look after
the Earth's life-support systems '

.

"The bottom line of this assessment is
that we are spending Earth's natural capital, putting such strain on
the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's
ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted," Reid said.

"At the same time, the assessment shows
that we can reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over
the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required
are substantial and not currently under way," he said.

The
assessment was carried out over the past three years and has been
likened to the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
- set up to investigate global warming - for its expertise in
environmental science.

In summary, the scientists found that
the planet had been substantially "re-engineered" in the latter half
of the 20th century because of the pressure put on the Earth's
natural resources by the growing demands of an increasing human
population.

"Over the past 50 years, humans have changed
ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any time in human
history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh
water, timber and fibre," the reports said.

The full costs of
this are only now becoming apparent.

Some 15 of the 24
ecosystems vital for life on Earth have been seriously degraded or
used unsustainably. An ecosystem is defined as "a dynamic complex of
plants, animals and micro-organisms that form a functional unit with
the non-living environment in which they coexist".

The scale
of the changes in the last few decades has been unprecedented.

Nearly one-third of the land surface is now cultivated, with
more land being converted into cropland since 1945 than during the
18th and 19th centuries combined.

Water withdrawn from rivers
and lakes for industry and agriculture has doubled since 1960 and
there is now between three and six times as much water held in
man-made reservoirs as there is in rivers.

Meanwhile, the
amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that has been released into the
environment through using farm fertilisers has doubled in the same
period . More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertiliser
ever used on the planet has been used since 1985.

This
release of free nitrogen and phosphorus - important mineral

nutrients for plant growth - has triggered massive blooms of
algae in the freshwater and marine environments. This is identified
as a potential "tipping point" that can suddenly destroy entire
ecosystems.

"The Millennium Assessment finds that excessive
nutrient loading is one of the major problems today and will grow
significantly worse in the coming decades unless action is taken,"
said Reid.

"Surprisingly, though, despite a major body of
monitoring information and scientific research supporting this
finding, the issue of nutrient loading barely appears in policy
discussions at global levels and only a few countries place major
emphasis on the problem."

"This issue is perhaps the area
where we find the biggest 'disconnect' between a major problem
related to ecosystem services and the lack of policy action in
response," he said.

Abrupt changes are one of the most
difficult things to predict, yet their impact can be devastating.

But is environmental collapse inevitable?

"Clearly,
the dual trends of continuing degradation of most ecosystem services
and continuing growth in demand for these same services cannot
continue," Reid said.

"But the assessment shows that over the
next 50 years, the risk is not of some global environmental
collapse, but of many local and regional collapses in particular
ecosystem services."

"We already see those collapses
occurring - fisheries stocks collapsing, dead zones in the sea, land
degradation undermining crop production, species extinctions," he
said.

Between 1960 and 2000, the world population doubled
from 3-billion to 6-billion. At the same time the global economy
increased more than six-fold and the production of food and the
supply of drinking water more than doubled, with consumption of
timber products increasing by more than half.

And human activity has directly
affected the diversity of wild animals and plants. There has been
about 100 documented extinctions over the past century, but
scientists believe that the rate at which animals and plants are
dying off is about 1 000 times higher than natural
levels.

"Humans are fundamentally and to a significant extent
irreversibly changing the diversity of life on Earth and most of
these changes represent a loss of biodiversity," said the
report.

The distribution of species across the world is
becoming more homogeneous as some unique animals and plants die out
and other, alien species are introduced into areas they would not
normally live in, often with devastating impact.

For example,
the Baltic Sea contains 100 non-native species, of which about
one-third come from the Great Lakes of North America. And a similar
proportion of the 170 non-native species found in the Great Lakes
come from the Baltic.

"In other words, the species in any one
region of the world are
becoming more similar to other regions.
Some 10% to 30% of mammals, birds and amphibians are currently
threatened with extinction. Genetic diversity has declined globally,
particularly among cultivated species," the report
said.

Agricultural intensification, which brought about the
Green
Revolution that helped to feed the world in the latter
part of the 20th century, has increased the loss of genetic
diversity.

"Currently 80% of wheat area in developing
countries and three-quarters of all rice planted in Asia is now
planted to modern varieties," the report said.

Reid said the
authors of the assessment were most worried about the state of the
Earth's drylands - an area home to some 2-billion people, many of
them the poorest in the world.

Drylands are areas where crop
production or pasture for livestock is severely limited by rainfall.
Some 90% of the world's dryland regions occur in developing
countries where the availability of freshwater is a growing
problem.

One-third of the world's people live in dryland
regions that have
access to only 8% of the world's renewable
supply of water, the scientists found.

"We were particularly
alarmed by the evidence of strong linkages between the degradation
of ecosystem services in drylands and poverty in those regions,"
Reid said.

"Historically, population growth has been highest
in either urban
areas or the most productive ecosystems such as
cultivated lands, but this pattern changed in the 1990s and the
highest percentage rate of growth is now in drylands - ecosystems
with the lowest potential to support that growth."

"These
problems of ecosystem degradation and the harm it causes for human
well-being clearly help set the stage for the conflict that we see
in many dryland regions including parts of Africa and central Asia,"
he said.

Poor people living in dryland regions are at the
greatest risk of environmental collapse. Many of them already live
unsustainably - between 10% and 20% of the soil in the drylands are
eroded or degraded.

"Development prospects in dryland regions
of developing countries are especially dependent on actions to slow
and reverse the degradation of ecosystems," the report
said.

So what can be done in a century when the human
population is
expected to increase by 50%?

The board of
directors of the Millennium Assessment said in a statement: "The
over-riding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the
power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the
nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring
better living standards to all."

"Achieving this, however,
will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every
level of decision-making and new ways of cooperation between
government, business and civil society."

"The warning signs
are there for all of us to see. The future now lies in our hands."

Asked what should be done, and what should be planned over
the next 50 years, Reid replied that there must be a fundamental
reappraisal of how we view the world's natural
resources.

"The heart of the problem is this: protection of
nature's services is
unlikely to be a priority so long as they
are perceived to be free and
limitless by those using them,"
Reid said.

"We simply must establish policies that require
natural costs to be taken into account for all economic decisions,"
he said.

"There is a tremendous amount that can be done in
the short term to reduce degradation - for example, the causes of
some of the most
significant problems such as fisheries
collapse, climate change, and excessive nutrient loading are clear:
many countries have policies in place that encourage excessive
harvest, use of fossil fuels, or excessive fertilisation of
crops."

"But as important as these short-term fixes are, over
the long term humans must both enhance the production of many
services and decrease our consumption of others. That will require
significant investments in new technologies and significant changes
in behaviour," he said.

Many environmentalists would agree,
and they would like politicians to go much further.

"The
Millennium Assessment cuts to the heart of one of the greatest
challenges facing humanity," said Roger Higman of Friends of the
Earth.

"We cannot maintain high standards of living, let
alone relieve poverty, if we don't look after the Earth's
life-support systems," Higman said.

"Yet the assessment
hasn't gone far enough in specifying the radical solutions needed.
At the end of the day, if we are to respect the limits imposed by
nature, and ensure the well-being of all humanity, we must manage
the global economy to produce a fairer distribution of the Earth's
resources," he said. - The Independent.

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