World at Environmental Crossroads, Says U.N. Report

Wed May 22, 5:10 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - The world is facing a critical choice between greed and humanity which will decide the fate of millions of people for decades to come, the United Nations (news - web sites) Environment Program said on Wednesday.

"The planet is at a crucial crossroads with the choices made today critical for the forests, oceans, rivers, mountains, wildlife and other life support systems upon which current and future generations depend," the UNEP's third global report said.
Already one quarter of the world's mammals and 12 percent of birds are under threat of extinction. The animals at risk range from rhinos to tigers and eagles, it added.
Life-giving forests are being ripped apart, fertile land is disappearing under concrete or into the sea and waterways are drying up or dying of pollution.
Dire poverty, hunger and sickness are rampant across the planet and the globalization of trade is carrying with it oil spills, litter, persistent organic pollutants and discharges of heavy metals.
The world's seas, already under attack from pollution, are also being plundered by man to the extent that nearly one-third of the world's stock of fish is now ranked as depleted, overexploited or recovering, the report said.
But the third Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-3) report stressed that all was not lost.
The world's leaders, gearing up for the World Summit on Sustainable Development -- dubbed the second world earth summit -- in Johannesburg in August had to take the initiative and give substance to the plethora of existing accords.
"We now have hundreds of declarations, agreements, guidelines and legally-binding treaties. Let us now find the political courage and the innovative financing needed to implement these deals," UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said.
Toepfer called on the leaders attending the earth summit to take concrete actions and set timetables backed with an iron will on all sides.
The report painted four possible scenarios ranging from the "markets first" future to the sustainability approach.
Under the first scenario, three percent of the earth's surface disappears under concrete by 2032, more than half the population is living with drought, 70 percent of the remaining land and animals are under threat and 16 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is being belched into the air each year from fossil fuels.
Under the second scenario, cities and highways eat up less land, drought is kept at bay by better water management, the pressure on land and animals stabilizes and global carbon dioxide emissions rise to just half the greed policy route.
"GEO-3 is neither a document of doom and gloom nor a gloss over the acute challenges facing us all," Toepfer said. "It is the most authoritative assessment of where we have been, where we have reached and where we are likely to go."