Date published: 2005/03/30
The BBC says:
Deforestation, climate change, and pollution are compromising economic and social progress in the world's poorest nations, a major report has found.
The report was carried out by 1,300 researchers to collate all that is known about environmental degradation around the globe.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is one of the biggest scientific collaborations ever undertaken.
Its main findings are being released at meetings in eight world cities.
The assessment found that human activities, particularly the spread of modern agriculture, have caused irreversible changes to the natural world.
It cited as an example the over-use of water for farming, which puts pressure on fresh drinking supplies. Land that has been farmed too intensively is also becoming barren.
Such effects, the report argues, are severe enough to threaten the Millennium Development Goals.
More than 2,500 pages long, the full study contains few quick-fix solutions, but correspondents say it does provide the best view yet of the problems facing humanity.
The assessment, which is intended to inform global policy initiatives, says changes in consumption patterns, better education, new technologies and higher prices for exploiting ecosystems could all help slow the damage being done to the planet.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a four-year, $21m effort designed by UN agencies, international scientific organisations, and development agencies .
Another "end of the world" report. Amazingly the BBC synopsis manages to not mention the number one problem, i.e. there are too many human beings. Either humanity will deal with this problem voluntarily or Mother Nature will take care of it as only she knows how (and it will not be the "end of the world", except possibly for us). Pricing ecosystems is a cute enough idea, only the main beneficiaries will be the economists doing the pricing and the land owners of the world, who will suddenly discover that their plot is worth even more than was previously imagined. (Of course governments being governments may then then just steal the assets.) And the idea that you could price anything in the ecosystem to accuracy within a factor of two is a joke, and that is not good enough. No doubt in the end some random politically haggled prices would be specified, and then the free market would take a few minutes to figure out how to exploit this to maximum effect.
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