Global Policy Forum

By H. Josef Hebert

Growing demand for resources is threatening the world's environmental health more than ever, a United Nations-sponsored report said Sunday. In the long term, it said, humans will pay the price, despite greater environmental awareness. The broad decline of the world's ecosystems - the interaction of organisms with their physical environment - must be reversed or there "could be devastating implications" for human development, the study said. "For too long in both rich and poor nations, development priorities have focused on how much humanity can take from our ecosystems, with little attention to the impact of our actions."

The report was prepared by the World Resources Institute, a private environmental think tank. The report reflects the findings of 197 scientists. The preliminary findings, based on a two-year study, are to be presented in detail at a meeting in September of the U.N. General Assembly. It will be key in deciding whether the United Nations will direct a broader study on the state of the world's environmental well-being, similar to an examination of climate change underway since the early 1990s.

The study was sponsored by the U.N. Development Programme, the U.N. Environmental Programme and the World Bank. It assessed the current health of agriculture, coastal areas, forests, fresh water environments and grasslands. "We can continue blindly altering Earth's ecosystems, or we can learn to use them more sustainably," Klaus Topfer, executive director of the U.N. Environmental Programme, said in a statement accompanying the report.

Among the scientists' findings:
- Half of the world's wetlands have been lost over the past 100 years.

- Dams and other diversions have fragmented 60 percent of the world's largest rivers, and 20 percent of the world's freshwater fish have disappeared or are in danger of vanishing.

- Half of the world's forests have disappeared and tropical deforestation continues at an alarming rate. About 9 percent of all tree species are at risk of vanishing.

- Fishing fleets are taking in much greater amounts of fish than the oceans can replace. As a result, 70 percent of the world's fish stocks are being overfished.

-Two-thirds of the world's agricultural lands have suffered from significant soil degradation over the last 50 years, and a third of the world's original forests have been converted to agriculture.

"Governments and businesses must rethink some basic assumptions about how we measure and plan economic growth," James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, said in a statement. The report was released as many environmental activists were in Washington protesting that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund too often support, through their lending practices, activities harmful to the global environment. While the U.N. report catalogued broad areas of concern and the need to change attitudes about ecosystem protection, it also emphasized the need for greater research. "Our knowledge of ecosystems has increased dramatically, but it has simply not kept pace with our ability to alter them," said Topfer, the United Nations official whose agency is in charge of U.N. environmental initiatives.

Despite the availability of satellite imaging, remote sensing, the Internet and other techniques, there is a growing information gap on ecosystem health and protection, the report said. "The dimensions of the information gap are large and growing, rather than shrinking as we would expect," explained Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, adding that "if we are to make sound ecosystem management decisions" in the century ahead, that gap must be closed.

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