Despite the save-the-environment efforts of the past two decades, there is growing scientific consensus that the world's environment is in trouble. For the first time in history, human impacts are occurring on a scale that affects the worldwide systems that control the climate and create the conditions for life.
For years, climatologists have warned that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere could trigger far-reaching global warming. Now, as an article in the April issue of Scientific American reports: "Evidence suggests that production of carbon dioxide and methane form human activities has already begun to change our climate." Significantly, the six warmest years on record occurred in this decade--1988, 1987, 1986, 1983, 1981, and 1980. According to the National Climate Program's latest report, the existence of greater warming at higher latitudes follows classic greenhouse warming predictions.
One class of greenhouse gases, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), has also been found to deplete the earth's ozone layer, which shields us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. Scientists have already discovered an ozone hole at the South Pole, and there is new evidence that the conditions necessary for ozone depletion are present in the Arctic. In addition, a report coordinated by NASA concludes that stratospheric ozone has also declined by as much as 3 percent over heavily populated areas of the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and Japan.
In the developing world, pressures from rapid population growth and poverty are intensifying. Of the one billion people to be added to the world's population by the year 2000, for example, 9 out of 10 will be born in the developing countries. Hundreds of millions of people live in absolute poverty in developing countries, destroying the resources on which their future depends because no alternative is open to them. As the World Commission on Environment and Development reported, "Many forms of development erode the natural resources upon which they must be based and environmental degradation can undermine economic development."
In the tropics, deforestation has reached alarming rates. By 1980, as much as 40 percent of the world's tropical forests had been destroyed. Today an acre of tropical forests disappears every second; at least 27 million acres--an area the size of Pennsylvania--are lost every year.
This loss is associated with massive extinctions of species of plants, birds, and other wildlife; with 20 percent or more of carbon dioxide emissions; and with patterns of development in once-forested areas and downstream that are environmentally unsustainable. Already, the rate of species extinction is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times faster than the natural rate.
These global environmental problems are closely interlinked, planetary in scale, and deadly serious. The risks are worldwide and the impacts, in many instances, are irreversible. No one nation can solve them alone. At the same time, individual nations are vulnerable to the acts of others.
The challenge for the remainder of this century is for enough nations to come together and develop an international environmental agenda that would be the basis for global commitment and
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