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WWF Living Planet Report
World Wildlife Federation (WWF)
The Living Planet Report is WWF’s periodic update on the state of the world’s ecosystems.
It describes the changing state of global biodiversity and the pressure on the biosphere arising from human consumption of natural resources.
It is built around two indicators:
- the Living Planet Index, which reflects the health of the planet’s ecosystems; and
- the Ecological Footprint, which shows the extent of human demand on these ecosystems.
These measures are tracked over several decades to reveal past trends, then three scenarios explore what might lie ahead.
The scenarios show how the choices we make might lead to a sustainable society living in harmony with robust ecosystems, or to the collapse of these same ecosystems, resulting in a permanent loss of biodiversity and erosion of the planet’s ability to support people.
(Nov 2006)
Commentary from at Chad Monfreda at WorldChanging:
The report launched in Beijing last week and has already generated more media coverage than any other report in WWF’s history. Everyone from Al-Jazeera to Fox News has picked it up. And everywhere from Japan to South Africa has too, no doubt aided by its release in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian and summaries in Chinese, Hindi, German, and Swahili. Particularly encouraging is its appearance in mainstream financial outlets like Bloomberg.
…This time around the standout solution to living equitably within the limits of the biosphere is the idea of ‘shrink and share’. The proposal is basically an extension of the concept of ‘contraction and convergence’, which sets a future limit to global carbon emissions and the eventual goal of equal per capita emission rights for everyone. Shrink and share does the same thing but with ecological footprints.
Dawn of the Dead Zones
Noreen Parks, ScienceNOW Daily News
The number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in global marine waters has jumped by more than a third in the last 2 years, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released last week. The latest figures reveal some 200 dead zones worldwide, up from 149 since 2004. The affected waters are robbed of fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life, damaging food supplies for millions of people worldwide, the report warns.
Dead zones form when microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton explode in number. When the phytoplankton die, bacteria feast on them and consume vast amounts of dissolved oxygen. The resulting oxygen depletion–or hypoxia–kills fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life. Although phytoplankton are the backbone of marine food chains and their populations naturally wax and wane, abnormally large “blooms” have been on the rise since the 1970s. According to the UNEP report, this has been due to skyrocketing marine levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers, sewage, animal wastes, and other sources.
(26 Oct 2006)
All wild seafood will disappear in 50 years, says ecologists’ study
Steve Connor, The Independent
All wild seafood will have disappeared from the world’s menus within 50 years if current trends in overfishing continue according to one of the most comprehensive studies of marine life.
The apocalyptic warning is issued by a team of ecologists and economists from a dozen research centres who have studied detailed records on fish catches going back to 1950.
(2 Nov 2006)
China turns to salt water to ease drought
Reuters, Yahoo! News
Drought-stricken China, where hundreds of millions of people are without regular access to drinking water, is turning to desalinated sea water to help end the crisis, the government said on Tuesday.
Apart from widespread drought, factories have ignored pollution hazards and dumped toxic industrial waste into rivers and lakes in China, home to one-fifth of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its water resources.
“China is expected to desalinate 800,000 to 1 million cubic meters of sea water per day and use 55 billion cubic meters annually by 2010,” the State Development and Reform Commission said, detailing China’s ninth five-year plan.
China desalinated 120,000 cubic meters of sea water per day last year.
It was not immediately clear how China, which is also desperately short of fuel, would power the energy-hungry desalination plants.
More than 600 medium- and large-sized cities in China were now suffering “serious water shortages,” Water Resources Minister Wang Shucheng said this month.
China is investing billions in a project to transfer water from its lush south to the arid north.
The so-called western route of the project could involve harnessing rivers cascading from the Tibetan highlands in the Himalayas to quench the thirst of Qinghai province and other poor western areas.
But Wang said the proposed system of tunnels stretching 300 km (190 miles), and costing more than the $25 billion Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric mega-project, was unnecessary, unscientific and not feasible.
(30 Oct 2006)
