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Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000
Worldwatch News Release:
Information Economy Boom Obscuring Earth's Decline
The fast-evolving information economy is affecting every facet of our lives,
but it is environmental trends that will ultimately shape the new century,
says the Worldwatch Institute in State of the World 2000, its first report
in the new millennium.
In the United States, the rapidly growing information economy has created
millions of jobs and helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average of stocks
from less than 3,000 in early 1990 to over 11,000 in 1999. “Caught up in the
growth of the Internet,” said senior author Lester Brown, “we seem to have
lost sight of the Earth’s deteriorating health. It would be a mistake to
confuse the vibrancy of the virtual world with the increasingly troubled
state of the real world.”
“When we launched this series of annual assessments in 1984, we hoped that
we could begin the next century with an upbeat report, one that would show
the Earth’s health improving,” said Brown. “But unfortunately the list of
trends we were concerned with then—shrinking forests, eroding soils, falling
water tables, collapsing fisheries, and disappearing species—has since
lengthened to include rising temperatures, more destructive storms, dying
coral reefs, and melting glaciers. As the Dow Jones goes up, the Earth’s
health goes down.”
The biological impoverishment of the Earth is accelerating as human
population grows. The share of bird, mammal, and fish species that are now
in danger of extinction is in double digits—11 percent of all bird species,
25 percent of mammals, and 34 percent of fish.
Local ecosystems start to collapse when rising human demands on them become
excessive. Soil erosion has forced Kazakhstan to abandon half its cropland
since 1980. The Philippines and Côte d’Ivoire have lost their once luxuriant
stands of tropical hardwoods—and the thriving forest product export
industries that were based on them. In the United States, the rich oyster
beds of the Chesapeake Bay that yielded over 70 million kilograms per year a
century ago produced less than 2 million kilograms in 1998.
And still the pressures build. The projected growth of world population from
6 billion at present to nearly 9 billion by 2050 will exacerbate nearly all
environmental problems, especially since almost all this growth will come in
the developing world where countries are already struggling to manage the
effects of their rapidly growing populations.
Another trend affecting the entire world is rising temperature.
Record-setting temperatures in the 1990s are part of a twentieth-century
warming trend. Just over the last three decades (between 1969-71 and
1996-98), global average temperature has risen by 0.44 degrees Celsius (0.8
degrees Fahrenheit). In the 21st century, temperature is projected to rise
even faster.
Rising temperatures are melting glaciers from the Peruvian Andes to the
Swiss Alps. The two ice shelves on either side of the Antarctic peninsula
are retreating. Over roughly a half-century through 1997, they lost 7,000
square kilometers of ice. But then within a year they lost another 3,000
square kilometers. Scientists attribute the accelerated ice melting to a
regional temperature rise of some 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees
Fahrenheit) since 1940.
Signs of melting are everywhere. In late 1991, hikers in the southwestern
Alps discovered an intact human body, a male, protruding from a glacier.
Apparently trapped in a storm some 5,000 years ago and quickly covered with
snow and ice, his body was remarkably well preserved. In 1999, another body
was found in a melting glacier in the Yukon Territory of western Canada.
“Our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a message for us: The Earth is
getting warmer,” said Brown.
One of the less visible trends shaping our future is falling water tables.
Although irrigation problems such as waterlogging, salting, and silting go
back several thousand years, aquifer depletion is new, confined largely to
the last half-century, when powerful diesel and electric pumps made it
possible to extract underground water far faster than the natural recharge
from rain and snow. Report co-author Sandra Postel estimates that the
worldwide overpumping of aquifers, which is concentrated in China, India,
North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, exceeds 160 billion
tons of water per year.
Since it takes roughly 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this
overpumping is the equivalent of 160 million tons of grain, or half the U.S.
grain harvest. In consumption terms, the food supply of 480 million of the
world’s 6 billion people is being produced with the unsustainable use of
water. If all countries stabilized water tables this year by eliminating
overpumping, the world grain harvest would fall by roughly 160 million tons,
driving grain prices off the top of the chart.
“Environmental decline is often seen as gradual and predictable, but if we
assume this, we are sleepwalking through history,” said report co-author
Chris Bright. “As pressures on the Earth’s natural systems build, there may
be some disconcerting surprises as trends interact, reinforcing each other
and triggering abrupt changes.”
For example, in October 1998, Hurricane Mitch slammed into Central America
and stalled for more than a week. Nightmarish mudslides obliterated entire
villages; 10,000 people died; half the population of Honduras was displaced
and the country lost 95 percent of its crops.
Global warming and the more destructive storms associated with it may
explain why Mitch was the fourth strongest hurricane to enter the Caribbean
this century, but much of the damage was caused by deforestation. If forests
had been gripping the soil on those hills, fewer villages would have been
buried in mudslides.
Another large-scale example of trends reinforcing each other can be seen in
the Amazon, where the forest is being weakened by logging and by clearing
for agriculture. As the Amazonian forest dwindles, it dries out. As it
becomes drier, it becomes more vulnerable to fire.
The fire feedback loop is also affected by forces outside the region, such
as higher temperatures. By burning large amounts of coal and oil, the United
States, China, and other countries may, in effect, be burning the Amazon.
“Economic euphoria may lead us to ignore trends that have the potential to
reverse progress,” said Brown, “from HIV/AIDS in Africa to falling water
tables in India. While the world economy is booming, the HIV epidemic is
devastating sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 800 million people. Life
expectancy—a sentinel indicator of progress—is falling precipitously as the
virus spreads. Before the onslaught of AIDS, life expectancy in Zimbabwe was
65 years. In 1998, it was 44 years. By 2010, it is projected to fall to 39
years. Other countries, such as Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, and
Zambia, are experiencing similarly graphic declines.”
Other trends also have the potential to reverse progress. In India, one of
many countries where population is outrunning water supply, water pumped
from underground far exceeds aquifer recharge. The resulting fall in water
tables will eventually reduce irrigation water supplies, threatening India’s
food security. Unless New Delhi can quickly devise an effective strategy to
deal with spreading water scarcity, India—like Africa—may soon face a
decline in life expectancy.
In a surprise finding, the study reports that the number of people who are
overnourished and overweight now rivals the number who are undernourished
and underweight, each group containing roughly 1.2 billion people. Other
chapters assess the issue of persistent organic pollutants, the future of
paper, the information economy, micropower technologies, and environmental
job creation.
“The two big challenges in this new century are to stabilize climate and
population,” said Brown. “If we cannot stabilize both, there is not an
ecosystem on Earth that we can save. Everything will change. If we can
stabilize population and climate, other environmental problems will be much
more manageable.”
Stabilizing population quickly depends on couples holding the line at two
surviving children—an achievable goal. Some 34 industrial countries have
already reached population stability, and several developing countries are
approaching it, including Barbados, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and
Thailand.
The challenge is to move from the U.N. medium level projection of nearly 9
billion in 2050 to the low projection of 7 billion. We know the keys to
stabilizing population—providing universal access to family planning
services and educating girls and women.
Stabilizing climate means replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar cells, and
other renewables. Today the world gets a fifth of its electricity from
hydropower, but this source is dwarfed by the potential of wind. Three U.S.
states—North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind
energy to supply national electricity needs. China could double its current
generation of electricity using only wind.
Previews of the new energy economy can be seen in the solar electric roofs
of homes in Japan and Germany, the wind turbines dotting the Danish
countryside, and the new wind farms in Spain and in the U.S. states of
Minnesota, Iowa, and Texas.
Restructuring economic policymaking to incorporate environmental issues will
not be easy. But some progress was made at the World Trade Organization
conference in Seattle in early December 1999, when some 50,000 demonstrators
challenged the WTO’s preoccupation with economics at the expense of
environmental, labor, and human rights issues. By the end of the five-day
collision between the ecological principles of sustainability and the
economic theory of comparative advantage that drove a half-century of trade
negotiations, the WTO was in full retreat. “It remains to be seen what the
long-term effect of the demonstrations and the strong public opinion that
they represented will be,” said co-author Hilary French. “But one thing is
certain: the environment is now on the international trade agenda.”
“The scale and urgency of the challenges facing us in this century are
unprecedented,” said Brown. “We cannot overestimate the urgency of
stabilizing the relationship between ourselves, now 6 billion in number, and
the natural systems on which we depend. If we continue the irreversible
destruction of these systems, our grandchildren will never forgive us. As
the report notes, ‘Nature has no reset button.’ ”
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20036
telephone: 202 452-1999
fax: 202 296-7365
e-mail worldwatch@worldwatch.org
or visit our website www.worldwatch.org
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