UN Study: Earth's Health Is Deteriorating
Sci-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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