A recently released $24 million four-year UN Millennium Ecosystems Assessment spells out the havoc wreaked by pressures to feed and provide resources for its more than 6 billion inhabitants. The largest study ever undertaken to determine the consequences of humans on Earth's natural bounty verifies the summation of environmental decline: "We have met the enemy and he is us!"
Over the past 50 years, as world
population has doubled, human activity has depleted 60% of the world's
grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes.
In the absence of sound environmental policies over the next 50 years, when population is projected to soar to over 9 billion, increased demands for food, clean water and fuel could hasten the loss of forests, fish and freshwater reserves, and lead to more frequent disease outbreaks.
The assessment also attempts to place monetary value on the world's ecosystems and forges a link between ecosystem health, the alleviation of poverty and sustainable development. Some 1.1 billion people do not have potable drinking water, and 3 to 4 million die each year of waterborne diseases. A fifth of the world's coral reefs and a third of its mangrove forests have been destroyed with a decline in the diversity of animal and plant species. Disease, floods and fires have been more frequent, and levels of the carbon dioxide have soared in the past 40 years.
According to the study, an intact wetland is worth $6,000 a hectare (2.471 acres) in Canada, while one that has been cleared for agriculture is worth only about $2,000. An intact mangrove area was estimated to be worth $1,000 a hectare in Thailand, against about $200 a hectare when cleared for aquaculture.
The early-1990s collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, due to over-fishing, put tens of thousands of people out of work; the cost for income support and retraining ran about $2 billion. In the late 1990s, the burning of 10 million hectares of Indonesia's forests cost $9 billion in increased health care, lost production, and lost tourism revenues. Canalization of rivers and other natural water bodies was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths in the 1990s, due to floods that caused $243 billion in damage.
Advocates of population stabilization maintain that while Malthus's timeframe may have been miscalculated, he had his science right.
The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment, however, is is a scientific judgment from a study of data by a wide range of experts. Their report makes it clear that the world community must do whatever it takes to preserve its natural capital or face environmental bankruptcy that would challenge all aspects of life on earth. These efforts cannot succeed without universal access to family planning, which provides voluntary safe and effective checks on human growth. Allowing grave warnings based on the best scientific information to go unheeded would amount to unparalleled and inexcusable human folly and place Homo sapiens at the top of the 21st Century's endangered-species list.
