The Challenges We Face- 'Saving the Earth...as we know it' [Johannesburg]

In Johannesburg, leaders will debate what to do about threats to our health, food, water, climate and biodiversity

source: Jeffrey Kluger & Andrea Dorfman Time Magazine 2002.8.12

For starters, let's be clear about what we mean by "saving the earth."
The globe doesn't need to be saved by us, and we couldn't kill it if we
tried. What we do need to save—and what we have done a fair job of
bollixing up so far—is the earth as we like it, with its climate, air,
water and biomass all in that destructible balance that best supports
life as we have come to know it. Muck that up, and the planet will
simply shake us off, as it's shaken off countless species before us.
In the end, then, it's us we're trying to save—and while the job is
doable, it won't be easy.

reference: time.com 2002.8.18

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was the last time world
leaders assembled to look at how to heal the ailing environment.
Now, 10 years later, Presidents and Prime Ministers are convening
at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg
next week to reassess the planet's condition and talk about where to
go from here. In many ways, things haven't changed: the air is just as
grimy in many places, the oceans just as stressed, and most
treaties designed to do something about it lie in incomplete states of
ratification or implementation. Yet we're oddly smarter than we were
in Rio. If years of environmental false starts have taught us anything,
it's that it's time to quit seeing the job of cleaning up the world as a
zero-sum game between industrial progress on the one hand and a
healthy planet on the other. The fact is, it's
development—well-planned, well-executed sustainable
development—that may be what saves our bacon before it's too late.

As the summiteers gather in Johannesburg, TIME is looking ahead
to what the unfolding century—a green century—could be like. In this
special report, we will examine several avenues to a healthier future,
including green industry, green architecture, green energy, green
transportation and even a greener approach to wilderness
preservation. All of them have been explored before, but never so
urgently as now. What gives such endeavors their new credibility is
the hope and notion of sustainable development, a concept that can
be hard to implement but wonderfully simple to understand.

Though it's not easy to see it from the well-fed West, a
third of the world goes hungry

With 6.1 billion people relying on the resources of the same small
planet, we're coming to realize that we're drawing from a finite
account. The amount of crops, animals and other biomatter we
extract from the earth each year exceeds what the planet can replace
by an estimated 20%, meaning it takes 14.4 months to replenish
what we use in 12—deficit spending of the worst kind. Sustainable
development works to reverse that, to expand the resource base and
adjust how we use it so we're living off biological interest without ever
touching principal. "The old environmental movement had a
reputation of élitism," says Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP). "The key now is to
put people first and the environment second, but also to remember
that when you exhaust resources, you destroy people." With that in
mind, the summiteers will wrestle with a host of difficult issues that
affect both people and the environment. Among them...

POPULATION AND HEALTH
The tide of people may not ebb until the head count hits the 11
billion mark

While the number of people on earth is still rising rapidly, especially
in the developing countries of Asia, the good news is that the growth
rate is slowing. World population increased 48% from 1975 to 2000,
compared with 64% from 1950 to 1975. As this gradual deceleration
continues, the population is expected to level off eventually, perhaps
at 11 billion sometime in the last half of this century.

Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped
slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is
moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the
world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS,
malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect.
Rural-land degradation is pushing people into cities, where
crowded, polluted living conditions create the perfect breeding
grounds for sickness. Worldwide, at least 68 million are expected to
die of AIDS by 2020, including 55 million in sub-Saharan Africa.
While any factor that eases population pressures may help the
environment, the situation would be far less tragic if rich nations did
more to help the developing world reduce birth rates and slow the
spread of disease.

Efforts to provide greater access to family planning and health care
have proved effective. Though women in the poorest countries still
have the most children, their collective fertility rate is 50% lower than
it was in 1969 and is expected to decline more by 2050. Other
programs targeted at women include basic education and job
training. Educated mothers not only have a stepladder out of poverty,
but they also choose to have fewer babies.

Rapid development will require good health care for the young since
there are more than 1 billion people ages 15 to 24. Getting programs
in place to keep this youth bubble healthy could make it the most
productive generation ever conceived. Says Thoraya Obaid, executive
director of the U.N. Population Fund: "It's a window of opportunity to
build the economy and prepare for the future."

FOOD
As we try to nourish 6 billion people, both bioengineering and
organic farming will help

Though it's not always easy to see it from the well-fed West, up to a
third of the world is in danger of starving. Two billion people lack
reliable access to safe, nutritious food, and 800 million of
them—including 300 million children—are chronically malnourished.

Agricultural policies now in place define the very idea of
unsustainable development. Just 15 cash crops such as corn, wheat
and rice provide 90% of the world's food, but planting and replanting
the same crops strips fields of nutrients and makes them more
vulnerable to pests. Slash-and-burn planting techniques and
overreliance on pesticides further degrade the soil.

Solving the problem is difficult, mostly because of the ferocious
debate over how to do it. Biotech partisans say the answer lies in
genetically modified crops—foods engineered for vitamins, yield and
robust growth. Environmentalists worry that fooling about with genes
is a recipe for Frankensteinian disaster. There is no reason,
however, that both camps can't make a contribution.

Better crop rotation and irrigation can help protect fields from
exhaustion and erosion. Old-fashioned cross-breeding can yield
plant strains that are heartier and more pest-resistant. But in a world
that needs action fast, genetic engineering must still have a
role—provided it produces suitable crops.

Increasingly, those crops are being created not just by giant biotech
firms but also by home-grown groups that know best what local
consumers need.

The National Agricultural Research Organization of Uganda has
developed corn varieties that are more resistant to disease and
thrive in soil that is poor in nitrogen. Agronomists in Kenya are
developing a sweet potato that wards off viruses. Also in the works
are drought-tolerant, disease-defeating and vitamin-fortified forms of
such crops as sorghum and cassava—hardly staples in the West,
but essentials elsewhere in the world. The key, explains economist
Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is not to
dictate food policy from the West but to help the developing world
build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce the things it
needs the most. "We can't presume that our technologies will bail
out poor people in Malawi," he says. "They need their own improved
varieties of sorghum and millet, not our genetically improved
varieties of wheat and soybeans."

WATER
In 25 years two-thirds of humanity may live in nations running short of life's elixir

For a world that is 70% water, things are drying up fast. Only 2.5% of
water is fresh, and only a fraction of that is accessible. Meanwhile,
each of us requires about 50 quarts per day for drinking, bathing,
cooking and other basic needs. At present, 1.1 billion people lack
access to clean drinking water and more than 2.4 billion lack
adequate sanitation. "Unless we take swift and decisive action," says
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "by 2025, two-thirds of the world's
population may be living in countries that face serious water
shortages."

The answer is to get smart about how we use water. Agriculture
accounts for about two-thirds of the fresh water consumed. A report
prepared for the summit thus endorses the "more crop per drop"
approach, which calls for more efficient irrigation techniques,
planting of drought- and salt-tolerant crop varieties that require less
water and better monitoring of growing conditions, such as soil
humidity levels. Improving water-delivery systems would also help,
reducing the amount that is lost en route to the people who use it.

One program winning quick support is dubbed WASH—for Water,
Sanitation and Hygiene for All—a global effort that aims to provide
water services and hygiene training to everyone who lacks them by
2015. Already, the U.N., 28 governments and many nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) have signed on.

ENERGY AND CLIMATE
Car exhaust is a major source of the heat-trapping gases that produce global warming

In the U.S., people think of rural electrification as a long-ago legacy of
the New Deal. In many parts of the world, it hasn't even happened
yet. About 2.5 billion people have no access to modern energy
services, and the power demands of developing economies are
expected to grow 2.5% per year. But if those demands are met by
burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, more and more
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will hit the atmosphere.
That, scientists tell us, will promote global warming, which could
lead to rising seas, fiercer storms, severe droughts and other
climatic disruptions.

Of more immediate concern is the heavy air pollution caused in
many places by combustion of wood and fossil fuels. A new U.N.
Environment Program report warns of the effects of a haze across all
southern Asia. Dubbed the "Asian brown cloud" and estimated to be
2 miles thick, it may be responsible for hundreds of thousands of
deaths a year from respiratory diseases.

The better way to meet the world's energy needs is to develop
cheaper, cleaner sources. Pre-Johannesburg proposals call for
eliminating taxation and pricing systems that encourage oil use and
replacing them with policies that provide incentives for alternative
energy. In India there has been a boom in wind power because the
government has made it easier for entrepreneurs to get their hands
on the necessary technology and has then required the national
power grid to purchase the juice that wind systems produce.

Other technologies can work their own little miracles.
Micro-hydroelectric plants are already operating in numerous
nations, including Kenya, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The systems divert
water from streams and rivers and use it to run turbines without
complex dams or catchment areas. Each plant can produce as much
as 200 kilowatts—enough to electrify 200 to 500 homes and
businesses—and lasts 20 years. One plant in Kenya was built by
200 villagers, all of whom own shares in the cooperative that sells
the power.

The Global Village Energy Partnership, which involves the World
Bank, the UNDP and various donors, wants to provide energy to 300
million people, as well as schools, hospitals and clinics in 50,000
communities worldwide over 10 years. The key will be to match the
right energy source to the right users. For example, solar panels that
convert sunlight into electricity might be cost-effective in remote
areas, while extending the power grid might be better in Third World
cities.

BIODIVERSITY
Unless we guard wilderness, as many as half of all species could
vanish in this century

More than 11,000 species of animals and plants are known to be
threatened with extinction, about a third of all coral reefs are expected
to vanish in the next 30 years and about 36 million acres of forest are
being razed annually. In his new book, The Future of Life, Harvard
biologist Edward O. Wilson writes of his worry that unless we change
our ways half of all species could disappear by the end of this
century.

The damage being done is more than aesthetic. Many vanishing
species provide humans with both food and medicine. What's more,
once you start tearing out swaths of ecosystem, you upset the
existing balance in ways that harm even areas you didn't intend to
touch. Environmentalists have said this for decades, and now that
many of them have tempered ecological absolutism with
developmental realism, more people are listening.

The Equator Initiative, a public-private group, is publicizing examples
of sustainable development in the equatorial belt. Among the
projects already cited are one to help restore marine fisheries in Fiji
and another that promotes beekeeping as a source of
supplementary income in rural Kenya. The Global Conservation
Trust hopes to raise $260 million to help conserve genetic material
from plants for use by local agricultural programs. "When you
approach sustainable development from an environmental view, the
problems are global," says the U.N.'s Malloch Brown. "But from a
development view, the front line is local, local, local."

If that's the message environmental groups and industry want to get
out, they appear to be doing a good job of it. Increasingly, local folks
act whether world political bodies do or not. California Governor Gray
Davis signed a law last month requiring automakers to cut their cars'
carbon emissions by 2009. Many countries are similarly proactive.
Chile is encouraging sustainable use of water and electricity; Japan
is dangling financial incentives before consumers who buy
environmentally sound cars; and tiny Mauritius is promoting solar
cells and discouraging use of plastics and other disposables.

Business is getting right with the environment too. The Center for
Environmental Leadership in Business, based in Washington, is
working with auto and oil giants including Ford, Chevron, Texaco and
Shell to draft guidelines for incorporating biodiversity conservation
into oil and gas exploration. And the center has helped Starbucks
develop purchasing guidelines that reward coffee growers whose
methods have the least impact on the environment. Says Nitin Desai,
secretary-general of the Johannesburg summit: "We're hoping that
partnerships—involving governments, corporations, philanthropies
and NGOs—will increase the credibility of the commitment to
sustainable development."

Will that happen? In 1992 the big, global measures of the Rio
summit seemed like the answer to what ails the world. In 2002 that
illness is—in many respects—worse. But if Rio's goal was to stamp
out the disease of environmental degradation, Johannesburg's
appears to be subtler—and perhaps better: treating the patient a bit
at a time, until the planet as a whole at last gets well.