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By James Kanter
The International Herald Tribune
Paris - The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage to the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report being issued today by the United Nations.
Climate change, the rate of extinction of species, and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, according to the United Nations Environment Program in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.
"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the Environment Program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are "among the greatest challenges at the beginning in of 21st century," he said.
The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those the United Nations has issued on the environment and called it "the final wake-up call to the international community."
Many biologists and climate scientists have concluded recently that human activities have become a dominant influence on the planet's climate and ecosystems. Underscoring the depth of those concerns was the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists that the Environment Program helped found and helps finance. But there is still a range of views on whether the altering climate could result in a catastrophic depletion of natural resources as the human population heads toward 9 billion by mid-century, or more of a steady diminution in diversity.
Over the last two decades the world population has already increased by almost 34 percent, to 6.7 billion from 5 billion. But the land available to each person is shrinking, from 19.5 acres in 1900 to 5 acres by 2005, and is projected to drop to 4 acres by 2050, the report said.
Population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger millions of human beings as well as plant and animal species, the report said.
Persistent problems identified by the report include a rapid rise of so-called dead zones, where marine life no longer can be supported because of depleted oxygen levels from pollutants such as fertilizers, as well as the resurgence of diseases linked with environmental degradation.
The report comes two decades after a commission chaired by the former Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, warned that the survival of humanity was at stake from unsustainable development.
Mr. Steiner said many of the problems the Brundtland Commission identified were even more acute now because not enough had been done to stop environmental degradation while flows of goods, services, people, technologies and workers has expanded, even to isolated populations.
He did, however, identify pockets of hope, noting that Western European governments had taken effective measures to reduce air pollutants and that Brazil had made efforts to roll back some deforestation in the Amazon. He said an international treaty to tackle the hole in the earth's ozone layer had led to the phasing out of 95 percent of ozone-damaging chemicals.
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