by Catherine McAloon
AP writer
Kenji Hall in Tokyo contributed to this report.
Associated Press
30 March 2005
LONDON -
Growing populations and expanding economic activity have strained
the planet's ecosystems over the past half century, a trend that
threatens international efforts to combat poverty and disease, a
U.N.-sponsored study of the Earth's health warned on Wednesday.
The
four-year, US$24 million study—the largest ever to show how
people are changing their environment—found that humans had
depleted 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests, farmlands,
rivers and lakes.
Unless
nations adopt more eco-friendly policies, increased human demands
for food, clean water and fuels could speed the disappearance of
forests, fish and fresh water reserves and lead to more frequent
disease outbreaks over the next 50 years, it said.
"This
report is essentially an audit of nature's economy and the audit
shows that we have driven most of the accounts into the red, if
you drive the economy into the red ultimately there are
significant consequences for our capacity to achieve our dreams in
terms of poverty reduction and prosperity," Jonathan Lash, a
member of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment board, said in
London.
Walter
Reid, director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, said over
the past 50 years humans had changed ecosystems more rapidly and
extensively than any comparable period in human history.
"These
changes have resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible
loss to the biological diversity of the planet," Reid said.
U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed that the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment "tells us how we can change
course," and urged nations to consider its recommendations.
Earlier
in the day at an event in Japan, A.H. Zakri, director of the
United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, said
eliminating trade barriers and subsidies, protecting forests and
coastal areas, promoting "green" technologies and
lowering greenhouse gas emissions thought to contribute to global
warming could help to slow environmental degradation.
The study
was compiled by 1,360 scientists from 95 nations who pored over
16,000 satellite photos from the U.S. National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, and analyzed reams of statistics and
scientific journals.
Their
findings, announced in several cities worldwide, highlight the
planet's problems at the end of the 20th century, as the human
population reached 6 billion.
A fifth
of coral reefs and a third of the mangrove forests have been
destroyed in recent decades. The diversity of animal and plant
species has fallen sharply, and a third of all species are at risk
of extinction. Disease outbreaks, floods and fires have become
more frequent. Levels of carbon dioxide _ a greenhouse gas _ in
the atmosphere have surged, mostly in the past four decades.
Conservation
groups called on governments, businesses and individuals to heed
the study's warnings.
"Ecosystems
are capital assets. We don't include them on our balance sheets,
but if we did the services they supply would dwarf everything else
in value," said Taylor Ricketts, director of conservation
science at World Wildlife Fund.
The
report said degradation of ecosystems was a barrier to achieving
development goals adopted at the U.N. Millennium Summit in
Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2000: halving the
proportion of people without access to clean water and basic
sanitation by 2015 and improving the lives of 100 million slum
dwellers by 2020.
The
ecosystem assessment was designed by the U.N. Environment Program,
the U.N. Development Program, the World Bank, the World Resources
Institute, the Global Environment Facility and others.
Governments, non-governmental organizations, foundations, academic
institutions and the private sector also contributed their
expertise.
On the Net:
http://www.millenniumassessment.org
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/12067.html
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