In the 20 th century, up to the beginning of the 1970’s, we thought that relations between Man and the Earth were harmonious. We firmly believed that raw material and energy resources would be available for a long time. Then, awareness of the limits of fossil energy resources began to grow, but only gradually. The principal danger envisaged at the time was of out-of- control population growth ( a doubling of world population every forty years) leading rapidly to the impossibility of feeding all the inhabitants of the planet from the middle of the 21 st century. This fear has now disappeared. The rate of growth of population has significantly diminished. Today, there are 6.5 billion people on earth, and population should stabilise at about 10 billion before the end of the century. But, in the meantime, other risks appeared towards the end of the 1980’s regarding the “materials” that had been thought to be inexhaustible and without any particular value: air, water, forests, the flora and fauna.
Air? Pollution of the air by residues from our activities (ozone, SO2, nitrous oxides, fumes …) poses threats to our health, even if measures have been taken to impose limits as far as possible: the norms regarding atmospheric pollution are more and more severe. In Europe, they are defined in European Union (EU) directives and are constantly evolving: for example, in December 2003, the EU, the United States, Japan and China signed an agreement concerning problems of pollution resulting from means of transportation. Research within the framework of this agreement will enable new anti-pollution norms to be defined in these countries.
The increase in the rate of discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere threatens radical change in the climate of the planet.
Water? With the increase in population, access to drinking water is becoming a problem in many countries: 1.2 billion human beings are deprived of water and 2.5 billions do not have access to purifying installations. Each year, 8 million people die after consuming contaminated water. All United Nations agencies have a “water resources” component in their programmes, but there is no single UN organisation in charge of water-related problems. Two institutions are working on the issue: the CME (“Conseil mondial de l’eau”, The World Council for Water), created in 1996 and based in Marseilles, and the GWP (Global Water Partnership). The CME currently brings together 330 members: governments, multinational companies, NGO’s, research centres, foundations, banks…The objective of the two organisations is the same, to study water problems worldwide and to come up with a policy for the management of water resources. Producing drinking water does not pose insurmountable technical problems: one uses water purification plants or sea-water desalination installations. However this latter solution is very costly in energy terms. An initial solution would be waste limitation. For example, the Worldwatch Institute, an inter-disciplinary American research organisation, formed in 1974 to study environmental problems on a world-wide scale, estimates in its 2004 report that losses of drinking water by waste and leaks are 30% in Paris and 50% elsewhere in France.
Forests? Their rate of disappearance is increasing in the countries where they were so vast that no one worried in the early days of their exploitation: in the Brazilian Amazonian Basin, in Indonesia …
Flora and fauna? We realise today that the problems go much deeper than the risk of disappearance of several emblematic animals: the giant panda, the snow leopard, the Sumatra tiger … The real problem is species which are disappearing in their thousands, at a rate much more rapid than that of natural disappearance. Bio-diversity itself appears threatened.
All these problems are due to the impact of human activity. That is obvious in the case of forests and pollution. Most independent experts consider that it is also true for climate change. |