Thank goodness
The IHT reports that the UN is apparently now, at long last, going to shut up about global doom and gloom, since it has just produced a “final” report:
UN issues ‘final wake-up call’ on population and environment
Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.
“The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns,” Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are “among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century,” he said…
Over the past two decades the world population has increased by almost 34 percent to 6.7 billion from 5 billion; similarly, the financial wealth of the planet has soared by about a third. But the land available to each person on earth had shrunk by 2005 to 2.02 hectares, or 5 acres, from 7.91 hectares in 1900 and was projected to drop to 1.63 hectares for each person by 2050, the report said…
The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those that the UN issues on the environment and called it “the final wake-up call to the international community.”
Three points: (a) didn’t we read something similar to this UN report a long time ago? (b) what gives with the use of land per capita as a critical measure as opposed to, for example, weath — are we all meant to be farmers? (c) what will the windy bureaucrats call the next report, since this one was supposed to be “final”?
October 27th, 2007 at 1:40 am
It will be final when they’ve worked out the solution to it all.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:04 am
If only it really were final - what would the do nothing hacks who the UN employs do?