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CODE GREEN
The environment goes critical
BY DEIRDRE FULTON

We’ve heard it before, and no doubt we’ll hear it — many times — again. Still, there’s something different about the latest environmental warning. Instead of simply chastising humans for what we’re doing to the world around us, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report (a yawn-inducing title for a project that’s really chock full of fascinating and frightening observations; perhaps the authors should have chosen Wake Up, Idiots! or Total Destruction: The Final Frontier) also reveals what the consequences are for its readers and their livelihoods, economies, hunger, and thirst. Never mind the trees we’re cutting down, the species we’re shuttling toward extinction, the 50 years of degradation behind us and the 50 ahead, the report says — here’s how this affects us.

The assessment was commissioned by United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan in 2001. It was conducted by more than 1300 experts, in almost 100 countries, over four years. Rather than collecting new data, the scientists and academics interpreted existing studies and science to create the massive final document. The completed project will now be used to raise ecosystem awareness around the world, to identify the most serious problems, and to figure out solutions.

To varying degrees, all humans depend on specific "ecosystem services," which are classified as "provisional" (food, water, fuel); "regulatory" (climate, water quality); "cultural" (recreational, spiritual); and "supporting" (soil formation, photosynthesis). With the degradation of those services, the report cautions, comes vulnerability. Here’s a glimpse at just how vulnerable we’ve become.

• Over the past 50 years, human activity has brought 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services — including fresh water, fisheries, regional and local climates, and air and water purification — to the point of ruin or unsustainability. The number of species on the planet has declined, while the area of land devoted to crops or livestock production has grown. What’s more, as ecosystems struggled keep up, the world population doubled between 1960 and 2000.

• Many countries, corporations, and people have benefited from the ecosystem changes that have created such an environmental mess. For example, increased food production has led to some alleviation of hunger around the world.

However, those benefits cannot be sustained. They come with "growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services ... the exacerbation of poverty for some people, and growing inequities and disparities across groups of people," the assessment says. In other words, the high won’t last — fisheries might collapse from too much fishing, floods might occur more frequently due to deforestation, or global temperatures might rise as a result of increased manufacturing. And who gets the shortest stick? Poor people, women, and indigenous communities, according to regional studies.

• What’s happening around us will make it harder to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development goals, which were created in 2000 to reduce poverty, hunger, and child and maternal mortality. In fact, says Karen Sack, an ocean-policy adviser at Greenpeace International, the assessment offers "clear evidence of the failure of the Millennium Goals process." It’s not the UN’s fault, she continues, but that of the participating governments, who "have not done what they need to do."

• It’s not all gloom and doom — yet. The assessment offers four "scenarios to explore plausible futures," and those show that significant changes (in government policy, in the use of environmentally sound technology, and in public education), could help mitigate some negative effects. Unfortunately, countries and corporations have been slow to embrace such changes.

Now, with this hefty report and the pack of scientists behind it, environmentalists hope their message will reach a wider audience.

"The voice is being honed," says Sara Bushey, who works in the international-affairs program at the National Wildlife Federation. "And it’s calling for an end to business as usual, and for governments and corporations to start looking at the world as a place where we need to balance economic development and the health of the public and the environment."

The assessment can be viewed in its entirety at www.millenniumassessment.org.


Issue Date: April 8 - 14, 2005
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