Will Earth survive man?

Will Earth survive man?

A planetary life or death struggle is unfolding

A brutal life or death struggle is taking place each day everywhere on this planet.

At times, it is invisible, as when a plant species, with its set of irreplaceable genes, disappears forever from an Amazon forest. Other times, it is painfully visible: a man chokes to death in a Mexico City subway, killed by a pollution-triggered asthma attack; the face of a New York woman is disfigured by skin cancer, one of 200,000 such cases predicted to occur over the next decades by the thinning of the protective ozone layer around the Earth. turning into dust. One million species may be extinct by the year 2000; a cure for AIDS or cancer or heart attacks may be lost forever with their genes.

Dirty water kills 25,000 people every day in developing countries. Air pollution makes people sick in the developed world. Lakes and forests are destroyed. In developing countries, the poor continue to damage an already frail environment in order to survive. Third world cities burst at the seams, their populations fleeing exhausted countrysides. Tropical forests, the Earth's greatest genetic reservoir, are being cut for fuel, agriculture or highways.

Much of the destruction is irreversible.

The warming of the Earth is well under way and only a cut to the bone in energy consumption in the world's richest countries will slow it.

The loss of the ozone layer is expected to continue at an alarmingly rapid pace for a generation or so, in spite of the recent UN-inspired protection treaty. In the past few weeks, ozone loss has been found to be three times greater than thought when a Protocol to cut production of ozone-damaging substances entered into force in January 1988.

Environmental consequences are long-range and incredibly complex--once a chain reaction starts in nature, it cannot be stopped cold. A chlorine molecule released today by a refrigerator in Bangkok or London can remain in the stratosphere for a century, destroying tens of thousands of ozone molecules.

But the knowledge of irreparable destruction should not paralyze us. Instead, it should propel each of us into action.

ACTION TO SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT

Action is what the United Nations is taking in view of the environmental challenge. Sixteen years ago, as a result of the first world conference on the environment, held in Stockholm, under United Nations auspices, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded.

UNEP is the environmental conscience of the UN system. The small, innovative body is a catalyst: its mission is not to do, but to provoke others into thinking and doing.

UNEP is not a big bureaucracy. It has a tiny professional staff (180 people), a modest annual budget ($45 million), and no enforcement power, so it cannot tell other UN agencies what to do.

Yet, after "quite a tense beginning", as one high UNEP official puts it, the agency has been extremely successful at prodding and persuading international giants such as the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to work harder for a protected environment. It has also managed to attract two additional dollars for each dollar it has received over the past 15 years--$450 million mobilizing $1.2 billion for environmental projects.

Co-ordinating UN environmental action is not all that UNEP does.

EarthWatch, UNEP's key programme, keeps an eye on all corners of the planet day and night. It tries to find out exactly what is going wrong, or right, with the environment and why. And it passes on this information in a clear, standardized form to Governments, scientists, industrialists and key groups in all regions.

Before EarthWatch, confusion was the standard in the field: scientists worked in isolation, using different criteria of measurement; data was difficult to compare; a coherent global environmental picture was lacking.

EarthWatch does its job by pulling together into a single global system called GEMS--Global Environment Monitoring System--the monitoring systems of as many as 142 nations, employing some 30,000 scientists and technicians. Satellites, low-flying planes, land stations, boats and fieldworkers are on 24-hour alert for changes in climate, pollution and the impact on health, natural resources and the oceans.

International organizations also help. One GEMS network run by WHO monitors urban air quality in 50 countries. Another, consisting of 448 stations in 59 countries, watches water quality. A third, run by WHO and FAO, monitors food contamination. The advance and retreat of the world's glaciers, a thermometer of climatic change, is monitored by a GEMS network run by WMO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which includes over 750 stations in 21 countries.

From Geneva, EarthWatch keeps track of potentially toxic chemicals. A barge carrying cyanide has capsized in Papua New Guinea and the Government wants to know what will happen to the river. The staff which compiles the International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals will quickly answer the query. Its data bank is fed by a network of international organizations, scientific institutions and industrial sources in 16 countries.

Other environmental queries--about 11,000 a year--are answered by INFOTERRA, a decentralized pool involving 6,000 institutions and 600 data banks in 129 countries, also part of EarthWatch.

UNEP acted as the political broker for the recent ozone layer agreement and is now starting to play that role for the "greenhouse effect". It has also been a major force behind the adoption of treaties on endangered and migratory species. Aside from pushing for passage of world environmental legislation and keeping a register of treaties, UNEP has advised to date 22 third world countries on how to set up and enforce environmental legislation.

More than 25,000 people have been trained in UNEP programmes since 1975. Some 2,000 were scientists trained by GEMS in environmental monitoring. About 1,500 technicians from developing countries have learned genetic resource conservation. Nearly as many farmers and technicians from over 40 countries have learned pest control methods. Up to a fifth of the UNEP budget is spent on education; much of that work is done jointly with UNESCO.

UNEP's public awareness effort encompasses the annual celebration of World Environment Day on 5 June, various publications, and TV programmes produced by the nonprofit Television Trust for the Environment, set up with Britain's Central TV.

UNEP is not a funding agency. But it serves as a bridge between aid donors and recipients, helping developing countries formulate environmental projects and encouraging donors to finance them. About 80 project are now going ahead in 40 countries.

A six-year system-wide set of environmental strategies for 1990-1995 was approved in March by the UNEP 58-nation Governing Council. It is shorter, clearer and more focused than its predecessor, which covered the period 1984-1989. It also has, for the first time, some teeth: it includes an explicit monitoring and evaluation process.

The United Nations will focus in the future on helping countries achieve sustainable development, reduce the impact of environmental degradation and pollution and rehabilitate ecosystems already degraded or polluted. Climatic change-- the ominous "greenhouse effect"--the ozone layer, tropical deforestation and toxic wastes will loom large on UNEP's agenda.

Governments and people must also tighten their environmental focus. UNEP chief Mostafa Tolba proposed, and the Programme's Governing Council agreed to, nine main goals to be reached by 1995. They range from pushing for the adoption of treaties on climate changes and toxic chemicals to tackling tropical deforestation headon as a major international problem.

The concept of sustainable development--development that does not hurt the environment--runs throughout the whole programme. It was the dominant theme of two ground-breaking documents: the Environmental Perspective to the Year 2000 and Beyond, which reflected the Governments' thinking, adopted by the General Assembly in 1987, and Our Common Future, the report of the high-level, non-governmental World Commission on Environment and Development, a major input to the Perspective.

Sustainable development is now the basis for the United Nations environmental philosophy and is already giving a sharper edge to global environmental action.

The planet may turn into a gigantic greenhouse

In September 2078 the General Assembly meets in emergency session to discuss a crisis in the Maldives. The ambassadors arrive by boat and make their way to the new Assembly Hall, on the 10th floor of the United Nations building in New York. Not one boat is propelled by a motor, since delegates want to set an example for the rest of the world. Manhattan island, now entirely under water, is called the city of a thousand bridges. All traffic is on foot or by water.

During a dramatic all-night session, delegates are told that two of the dikes built a generation ago to contain the sea around the main islands of the Maldivian archipelago in the Indian Ocean have collapsed, and all life within three miles has been wiped out. The President of Maldives asks that the entire population of his nation be immediately relocated to the mainland of the African continent. The Assembly agrees and the largest evacuation operation of the 21st century starts two days later. A few hours after the last Maldivian is ferried out of his homeland, the sea swallows those picturesque coral reef islands.

The above scenario of the future may not be farfetched. Oceans inevitably expand as they are heated. The global "warming" already under way could therefore push sea levels everywhere to more than six feet. One third of the world's population that lives within 60 kilometres of coastlines would be threatened.

A rise of less than two feet in sea level might inundate 27 per cent of Bangladesh, displacing 25 million people. Egypt could lose 20 per cent of its productive land, the United States, between 50 and 80 per cent of its coastal wetlands. A 6-foot rise could wipe out the 1,190-island Maldivian archipelago.

If the Arctic and the Antarctic glaciers were to melt, sea levels would rise nearly 300 feet, flooding many major world cities and all ports.

Average global temperatures may rise by 4.5 degrees centigrade by the year 2030. To understand the magnitude of this occurrence, one only must realize that the planet's climate has not varied by more than 2 degrees centigrade over the past 10,000 years and that during the last Ice Age global temperatures averaged some 5 degrees colder than now.

A six-foot sea level rise, dramatic as that might be, would be among the milder consequences of a global warming. Agriculture would be hardest hit. Wheat production would have to move north, where depleted soils could result in crop reduction. The production of rice--crucial to the diets of 60 per cent of the world's population--would suffer in a drier world. Dust bowls, dying forests, unbearably hot cities, more frequent storms, forest fires and outbreaks of pestilence and disease would also occur.

Why is the earth warming up?

Carbon dioxide--mainly released by the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels--and other industrial gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere and warming the Earth as if it were a greenhouse.

Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by some 25 per cent. They are expected to increase another 30 per cent over the next 50 years.

Other greenhouse gases are nitrous oxide (laughing gas), methane, ozone and the ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. Their collective presence in the atmosphere will double the carbon dioxide effect.

At the end of March 1988, American, British and Soviet scientific data showed that the decade of the 1980s has been the warmest in over a century. The warmest year on record was 1987, according to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Some scientists attribute this to the "greenhouse effect". Others prefer to wait and see if the pattern persists into the next decade before deciding. Tom Wigley, head of the British research unit, told The New York Times that if "the next 10 years are as warm or warmer, it would be very hard to deny the greenhouse effect", adding "it is very hard to deny now".

Little has been done to tackle this problem which is, in many ways, a more serious issue than ozone loss.

For the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which pioneered studies on the subject in the early 1970s, its reality is no longer at issue: the only questions remaining are when the effects will occur and to what degree. With ozone loss widely acknowledged as a major threat in need of urgent solution, the "greenhouse effect" is moving to the top of UNEP's agenda.

UNEP's first goal is to advance scientific research to obtain specific data on consequences for regions and countries. Existing data now are mostly global and general. With specific data in hand, UNEP can then ask Governments to either control the greenhouse effect or be ready for the consequences and adopt contingency measures, such as planning evacuation from flooded cities.

There is only one practical way to control the greenhouse problem: to slash energy production. It is unlikely that countries will be willing to do this. For industrialized nations, it would mean a radical shift to energy conservation or alternative energy sources. In developing countries, while technologically easier to accomplish, shift might not be possible for political and economic reasons.

Adapting to a changing climate might be the only recourse.