UN Study: Earth's Health Is DeterioratingSci-Tech Today
Unless nations adopt more eco-friendly policies, increased human demands for food, clean water and fuels could speed the disappearance of forests, fish and fresh water reserves and lead to more frequent disease outbreaks over the next 50 years, the U.N. report said.
Growing populations and expanding economic activity have strained the planet's ecosystems over the past half century, a trend that threatens international efforts to combat poverty and disease, a U.N.-sponsored study of the Earth's health warned on Wednesday.
The four-year, US$24 million (18.57 million euro) study - the largest-ever to show how people are changing their environment - found that humans had depleted 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes.
...Walter Reid, director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, said over the past 50 years humans had changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than any comparable period in human history.
"These changes have resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss to the biological diversity of the planet," Reid said.
...A fifth of coral reefs and a third of the mangrove forests have been destroyed in recent decades. The diversity of animal and plant species has fallen sharply, and a third of all species are at risk of extinction. Disease outbreaks, floods and fires have become more frequent. Levels of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas - in the atmosphere have surged, mostly in the past four decades.
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