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STARTING in 1968, photographs of Earth began to come back with the Apollo
Moon missions, and for the first time we were able to see our planet entire.
Those stunning images have made it easier for us to think about the global
environment—the landmasses, oceans and atmosphere, the systems of climate
and currents, and the surface layer, or biosphere, where life inhabits this
physical world.

But the real picture is not so pretty. From ozone depletion to climate change
and deforestation, human activity is disrupting Earth’s natural systems in
unprecedented ways. And persistent social problems—poverty, war,
population growth and the rise of cities—complicate the picture by both
contributing to environmental degradation, and exacerbating the problem of the
uneven distribution of resources. As the wellbeing of Earth is ultimately our
own, the state of the planet is now an international issue, inspiring some of
the most far-reaching and hotly debated policies of our time.

It is strange, now, to think how long we took Earth for granted. Natural
history, as the study of the environment was first known, became immensely
popular in the 19th century, and awareness of how humankind affects the natural
world grew in the early 20th century. But it was not until the 1930s that the
web of relationships among organisms and their habitats began to be known, and
not until the late 1960s that ecology—the formal study of those
relationships—exploded into public consciousness. One of the igniting
sparks was Silent Spring (1962), marine ecologist Rachel Carson’s
revelation of how a manufactured chemical could permeate every part of an
environment—water, soil, plants, animals—by working its way up the
food chain.

Club of Rome

Thinking globally

ECODISASTERS are not the whole story, however. The pressing problem of
meeting humanity’s basic needs has forced environmental movers and shakers of
every stripe to think in the long term and concentrate on changing our wasteful
ways. A framework for putting these ideas into practice has been in the works
since the early 1970s. At this time the Club of Rome, a nonpolitical,
international alliance of scientists, businessmen and politicians, was
formulating a global model that would spur governments and the UN to act. Their
researchers’ report was published as The Limits to Growth in
1972—the same year the seminal UN Conference on the Human Environment took
place in Stockholm (Box 1).

The Limits to Growth was hugely influential, identifying the main
areas of global concern as human population increases, industrialisation,
pollution, food production and depletion of resources—substances and
energy sources that can be used by humanity. It asserted that if current trends
persisted, the limits to growth on our planet would be reached within a century.
It further opined that it was possible to change these patterns in favour of
economically and ecologically sustainable conditions—that is, ways of
meeting human needs without compromising the productivity or health of the
environment.

These environmental buzzwords are more complex than they appear at first
glance. Resources may be biotic or physical, renewable or nonrenewable. Physical
resources that are nonrenewable, or never naturally replaced once taken, range
from metals and stone to fossil fuels such as coal. Biotic resources include
fuels such as biogas and fibres such as cotton, wool or cellulose from wood.
These are renewable but often overused, and certain aspects of their
production—clearfelling of trees, for instance—damage the
environment. Biotic resources are in fact prey to an insidious squeeze: demand
for them continues to rise as both populations and expectations increase, yet
there is only so much land that can be given over, say, to growing cotton. So to
our notion of Earth as a fund of resources must be added limits—and these
make sustainability imperative.

Sustainability is not a new idea. In the early 19th century the British
economist Thomas Malthus developed the idea that nature is not simply a
never-ending resource ripe for human exploitation. His concern was that
improvements in the means to support life, such as food production, are
outstripped by poulation growth. Now, Malthus’s simple concept has been
rethought as sustainable development—that is, encouraging social and
economic balance, maintaining genetic diversity and protecting ecological
systems.

Twenty years after The Limits to Growth, the report’s authors
re-examined their material and concluded, in Beyond the Limits, that
levels of use of many resources and the generation of many pollutants had passed
sustainable limits, but that sustainability was, given an international effort,
still attainable. Meanwhile, 1987 had seen the publication of Our Common
Future. This key report on sustainable development was put together by the
UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norway’s then
prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

Our Common Future delved into many by now familiar issues, adding
biodiversity—the diversity of life—and energy use to the list. It
also picked up current negotiation on the Law of the Sea to reinforce the
concept of the global commons—the seas and oceans, atmosphere, outer space
and Antarctica. Seven years later, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,
signed by 159 countries, entered into force as the legal basis for a cooperative
approach to the world’s oceans. The Antarctic Treaty, which now has 43
signatories, has kept the region demilitarised and environmentally safeguarded,
allowing only cooperative international research, for nearly 40 years. And the
Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed in
1987—international action performed at breakneck speed.

The biggest international gathering on development and the environment yet
was the 1992 Earth Summit. More than 100 world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro to
produce a general Declaration of Principles, conventions on climate change and
biodiversity, a statement of principles on forestry, and Agenda 21—a
worldwide programme of action on sustainable development into the next
century.

That year, the Basel convention on the movement and disposal of hazardous
wastes, came into force. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification followed in
1994.

Five years after Rio, however, there was a special session of the UN General
Assembly to review progress, and for all the talk, little had been achieved. Of
the industrial countries only three of them—Britain, Germany and
Russia—will fulfil their Rio undertaking to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide, a prime player in global warming, to 1990 levels by 2000. Some of the
worst offenders are still wrangling over their responsibilities. Population
increase, the degradation of forests, pollution and poverty are still with
us—as never before.

It doesn’t look good for planet Earth. But through these and future
conferences and conventions, the UN agencies and nongovernmental organisations
(Box 1) that attend and administer them continue to construct a legal and policy
framework for action working at local, national and international levels.

The 1972 Stockholm conference, for example, incorporated much work on
environmental impact assessment
(Figure 2). Arising from American legislation of
the late 1960s, EIA provides a statutory framework obliging all levels of
government and other decision makers to take account of the environment during
any proposed development. EIA also allows for public participation, and
procedures for appeal and resolution of disputes.FIG-21125402.jpg

EIA is intended to minimise the negative effects of development on all
aspects of the environment—from the atmosphere to housing and employment
opportunities. There are a number of methods for carrying out EIA, such as
cost-benefit analysis (CBA), but all suffer some defects.

For a road-building project, say, CBA dictates that anything improving human
wellbeing, such as savings in travel time, is a benefit, while anything reducing
it, such as loud traffic noise, is a cost. The pros and cons are then weighed
up. But CBA is often criticised as involving too many value-laden judgments.
Future costs are normally given less value, which has the overall effect of
minimising them: in our hypothetical example, environmental damage is more
likely to occur later—when noxious exhaust fumes pollute the air, for
example. But in the short term the benefits may outweigh the costs.

Value judgment

Paying the price

THERE are cases when costs or benefits cannot be quantified: military defence
might override environmental considerations, or there might be a need to
preserve a certain ecosystem. Cost-effectiveness analysis may then be brought
into play. In essence, CEA tries to find a way to meet environmental objectives
at lowest cost. The results are often artificial, indicating that some things
cannot be valued in monetary terms, and that judgment—subjective as well
as objective—is necessary.

Another significant legislative concept, the polluter-pays principle, was
introduced in 1972 by member countries of the Organization for Economic
Development (OECD). The principle makes industry itself responsible for
protecting the environment, and consumers pay the costs involved. Many countries
have, however, failed to apply the principle because assessing the costs and
liabilities of a pollution incident and its long-term effects is so difficult.
Still, pollution taxes—in which an independent panel of experts assesses
costs—have been mooted, carbon taxes being one example of these.

So much for general procedures to prevent rampant environmental abuse. But
what of specific responses to the big issues of our day, the ongoing threats to
life— including human life—on Earth?

Human population growth lies at the heart of most environmental problems and,
along with the distribution of resources and technological change, is one of the
prime shapers of our future
(Figure 3). Environmental damage is intimately
linked to it: rapid growth makes heavy demands on all available resources and
vastly increases the generation of waste (Box 2).FIG-21125403.jpg

The UN and other bodies have attempted to estimate rates of population
growth. In general terms, human fertility is falling, but world population is
still increasing by about 80 million people a year—that is, 440 million
since the 1992 Earth Summit alone. In China, the UN expects the population to
rise from 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion by 2030.

How can population growth be restrained? The issues were fully debated at the
UN Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, where a
broad programme of action was agreed. Vitally, the conference recognised the
need to improve the status of women, make modern contraception more widely
available, and educate young people, particularly girls. In a few countries,
fertility rates have fallen to replacement levels (that is to say an average of
one child per head of population), but in the poorest, even with AIDS now a
demographic factor, rates are still very high.

Meanwhile, it’s hotting up: the warmest years on record are clustered in the
1990s. The greenhouse effect that triggers global warming is a natural
phenomenon making life on Earth possible, but concentrations of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are at their
highest ever now, pumped up artificially by industry, cars and other
sources.

In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sponsored by the World
Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme, was set up to
establish the science behind the phenomenon, measure the human impact and
suggest what to do about it. The IPCC, which represents the best available
scientific consensus, is now preparing its third assessment. Its latest
conclusion is that human activity is already having a discernible effect on
climate.

The work of the IPCC greatly influenced the preparation of the Framework
Convention on Climate Change signed at the 1992 Earth Summit, and is now a point
of reference. As this article went to press, the next step for signatories to
the convention was a conference at Kyoto early this month, where it was hoped
that targets would be set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised
countries. Our continuing dependence on fossil fuels and the cult of the car
were particular areas of concern.

Diversity shrinks

Fuelling the future

THE loss of biodiversity—at the genetic, species and ecosystem
levels—has also emerged as a vital concern. Some think it is the most
important of all. We take natural services for granted, yet by destroying
habitats and species at what has been calculated as a thousand times the natural
rate, we are impoverishing the life systems on which we depend. In his Gaia
hypothesis, the British scientist James Lovelock drew attention to the ability
of organisms and the planet as a whole to help create and regulate the
environment. We make this increasingly difficult, for example by destroying the
rainforests, with results that cannot be predicted.

The World Conservation Union Red Data Book records the status of many
endangered species, but the loss of some may go largely unheralded. The
introduction of Nile perch into Lake Victoria, for instance, killed off between
200 and 300 species of native cichlid fish.

Keeping abreast of extinctions is difficult. Since 1992 alone, for
instance,worldwide deforestation has led to the extinction of more than 130 000
species. Yet the destruction could be curbed. In Amazonia, it is estimated that
if all deforestation continues at present levels to the year 2000, 15 per cent
of all plant species there will have disappeared; if it continues until only
parks and reserves are left, 66 per cent will have gone.

Genetic diversity is important because it confers reproductive vitality to
species and allows them to adapt to changing circumstances. For domestic plants
and animals, it can be a matter of life and death. Intensive cultivation and
globalisation of transport together tend to spread pests around the world, but
genes in the wild forebears of domestic species can play a vital role in keeping
crop plants healthy and productive. In 1970, for instance, the US maize crop was
damaged by fungal infection, and losses amounted to $2 billion. The
problem was solved by incorporating genes for resistance from Mexican
stocks.

The Rio Convention on Biological Diversity is no more than a start. The US
signed the convention, but under pressure from industrial interests has so far
failed to ratify it. Many of the issues covered by the convention remain
unresolved—notably, that the signatories were left with wide discretion in
their use of wild native species. This leaves a thorny problem. Who owns the
plant products, often found in the poorest and wildest parts of the world, that
pharmaceuticals companies develop and synthesise at vast profit? If royalties
are payable on oil, wherever it is found, why should they not be paid on
commercially useful plants? And if so, to whom should the payments be made?

Finally, energy use is a growing global problem
(Figure 4). Most of our
energy needs are currently derived from non-renewable sources such as gas,
coal and nuclear fuels. Globally, energy use is often expressed in
terawatts—1 terawatt being 1 trillion watts, equivalent to the burning of
a billion tonnes of coal. In 1980, global energy use was about 10 terawatts, and
it is estimated to rise to 14 terawatts a year by 2025—unless worldwide
consumption reaches the levels seen in industrialised countries, in which case
the figure would be a whopping 55 terawatts.FIG-21125404.jpg

As any rises mean an increase in global warming, pollution levels and risk
from nuclear accidents and waste storage, a low-energy future is desirable, as
is a move away from fossil fuels. At the moment, renewable sources such as solar
and wind power provide only 2 terawatts a year, but are capable of up to 13
terawatts.

Given such variable predictions, and the vagaries of human behaviour despite
the worthiest of intentions, the future health of our planet seems uncertain.
But as with many enduring issues, what was once radical and little accepted has
become policy: environmental awareness and action have come a long way in the
20th century.

* * *

1: Movers and shakers

OF ALL the actors on the environmental stage, nongovernmental organisations
(NGOs), whether tiny pressure groups or international charities, have been the
power behind public environmental awareness. The UN and its agencies have
meanwhile played a coordinating role in global environmental efforts.

We have come a long way since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the
Environment. This had four important outcomes: an emphasis on human development,
compromises on what development really meant, the involvement in and recognition
of many NGOs, and the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

At present, UNEP has its internal problems, but the message of sustainable
development has reached nearly all the UN agencies and associated bodies,
including the World Bank. And the new UN Commission on Sustainable Development
has helped to bring together the strands of environment and development
worldwide.

While international recognition came late for NGOs, they were far ahead of
the UN in getting to grips with environmental issues. Environmental groups were
forming in Britain and the US as early as the 19th century. And they have become
enormously popular: a 1997 MORI poll indicated that 4.5 million
Britons—about 10 per cent of the adult population—had been members
of environmental organisations over the past two years.

By 1989, there were more than 20 000 such organisations worldwide. Many
direct action groups—notably Greenpeace—were set up to
focus on one source of pollution, such as nuclear waste. In France, Germany
and other countries, proposals for nuclear power plants have triggered violent
protests over the hazards of waste storage and plant operation. Accidents in
March 1978 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and in April 1986 at Chernobyl
have heightened these fears.

In developing countries, environmental activism has quietly burgeoned. Kenya,
for instance, has a well-developed network of NGOs, with more than 60 devoted to
tree planting. The National Council of Women in Kenya, led by Wangari Maathai,
is one of the most prominent. And India has one of the world’s most energetic
NGOs in the Centre for Science and Environment, which reports on the state of
the country’s environment.

Small pressure groups were also the catalyst for Green parties, which now, in
many cases, have faded from view. But their aims, and those of thousands of
NGOs, have at least partly been met: environmental concerns are firmly
entrenched in mainstream party politics.

* * *

2: A crowded, dirty place

POPULATION growth and pollution are inextricably joined: as the former rises,
the latter spreads. And we have already had a lavish foretaste of how serious
the effects of pollution can be. Methyl isocyanate poisoning in Bhopal, India,
killed 3600 people in 1989—the same year the Exxon Valdez oil spill left
some 1740 kilometres of Alaskan coast contaminated.

Pollutants—substances that are in the wrong place and are harmful to
organisms—can be found in nature, but generally in minute quantities. Many
of them are manufactured chemicals, such as poly-chlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs)—widely used in the production of plastics—while forms of
energy such as radioactive beta particles, which are carcinogenic, also
count.

As a rule, the more polluted the area, the more crowded it is, and the
poorer. But poverty also ensures that little is wasted, and much is scavenged
and recycled. As prosperity increases, the amount of material available for
recycling increases, but the activity itself tends to decrease. More waste goes
to landfill, or is exported to poorer or less densely populated areas.
Eventually, recycling comes back into vogue—as in the West from the 1970s
onwards. Fully sustainable waste management is the ultimate goal, but no country
has yet achieved it. It will most likely happen in nations with the highest
population densities and pressure on resources, such as Japan.

Pollution of water—to take only one sort—is on the increase
worldwide. No part of the oceans is exempt, and the demand for fresh water is
doubling every 21 years.

Coastal waters are also essential as spawning and breeding grounds for many
marine organisms, and much of our fish comes from them. But coasts and reefs are
highly vulnerable to pollution such as oil spills
(Figure 1) and development
pressures, and many are already in deep trouble.FIG-21125401.jpg

How to stem the tide? One of the strongest solutions is, as we have seen,
lowering rates of population growth. But protecting the physical environment
demands an improvement in the social environment. Sustainable development will
only happen if people have in hand the right tools—health, prosperity,
knowledge—to get on with the job.

Nearly half the world’s population lives on or near coasts, and face the
prospect of sea-level rises which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, could be as much as half a metre by the end of the next century.
The result could be devastating.