<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Friday, April 01, 2005

The Brink of Disaster 

I'll let the article speak for itself, and for our children's children:

The State of the World? It is on the Brink of Disaster
An Authoritative Study of the Biological Relationships Vital to Maintaining Life has Found Disturbing Evidence of Man-made Degradation

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 who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.

The report does not make jolly reading. 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 dryland regions of the world, which account for 41 per cent of the earth's land surface, have been particularly badly damaged and yet 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 half a dozen potential "tipping points" that could abruptly change things for the worse, with little hope of recovery on a human timescale.

Even if 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.

# posted by scorpiorising : 12:36 AM |

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?