Citizens of industrialized countries are eating more meat, drinking more coffee, popping more pills and driving more miles, the Worldwatch Institute says in its latest report on the environmental impact of human lifestyles.
The 10th anniversary edition of Vital Signs 2001: The Trends That are Shaping Our Future illustrates how an economy geared towards insatiable consumer demand can degrade human, environmental, and economic health.
A team of 20 researchers, writers and editors from the Washington, DC based environmental think tank contributed to Vital Signs 2001, which tracks 49 key trends.
"We're finding more and more evidence that the developed world's consumption-filled lifestyle choices are often as unhealthy for ourselves as for the planet we inhabit," said Michael Renner, Worldwatch researcher and Vital Signs project director. "And while much of the world remains too poor to afford such choices, the emerging middle classes in developing nations are following the same damaging patterns pioneered in the developed world. Meat and coffee consumption are on the rise, as is obesity, and over half of the world smokers are now in developing nations."
Worldwatch researchers have documented that humans' appetite for meat is growing quickly. "The number of four-footed livestock on earth at any given moment has increased 60 percent since 1961, and the number of chickens, ducks and other fowl, has quadrupled, from 4.2 billion to 15.7 billion," the report says.
Feedlot production, the fastest growing method for raising livestock, is being recognized as a threat to soil, air and water quality. Concentrated in North America and Europe, feedlots are now found near urban centers in Brazil, China, India, the Philippines and elsewhere in the developing world.
The demand for more meat means that more antibiotics are fed to farm animals, a practice which reduces the effectiveness of these drugs in humans as the microorganisms at which they are targeted develop resistance.
The industrial farming practice of giving feed mixed with blood and bone meal to vegetarian animals has created a crossover of disease from animals to humans - mad cow disease which in humans becomes new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
All the trends are interlaced. Fuel prices skyrocket, yet people buy more cars and drive them farther than ever before. The world's fleet of passenger vehicles reached 532 million in 2000.
A greater reliance on cars heats up the planet and leads to more sedentary lifestyles, a major cause of obesity, Vital Signs says.
Technological innovation soars, yet 90 percent of commercial energy use worldwide continues to come from fossil fuels. Alternative energy sources such as wind still only account for one percent of the world total, Worldwatch reports.
There are a few positive signs in Vital Signs 2001. Growing numbers of people are using socially responsible criteria to guide their investments. In the United States, socially responsible investments climbed from $59 billion in 1984 to $2.16 trillion in 1999. That means $1 out of every $8 under professional management is funding socially responsible organizations.
The Vital Signs 2001 report was made possible with the support of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer said the challenge of this new century is to extend the economic progress of the last 50 years, while halting the ecological decline, for a sick planet will, sooner or later, lead to a faltering economy.
"The question is whether humanity will forge a healthier, sustainable future or risk the downward spiral as a result of not understanding the ecological and economic threshold the world is now on," Toepfer said. "I hope that the statistical snapshot contained in Vital Signs 2001 will help fill this information gap."
This edition of Vital Signs presents a three-dimensional, integrated picture of Earth's health-environmental, human, and economic. Today's economy-thriving on massive resource use, generating large amounts of pollutants, and disrupting natural cycles-imposes increasingly unsustainable burdens on the environment. And the deterioration of critical ecosystems like wetlands and coral reefs can boomerang: communities have less protection against extreme weather events, and disease vectors are able to spread more easily, compromising human health and well-being. Measures taken in the name of furthering public health, on the other hand, can sometimes throw natural balances out of kilter: the escalating use of antibiotics, for instance, helps produce more virulent infectious disease strains. Environmental crises and health epidemics translate into rising economic costs-in the form of property losses from natural disasters and skyrocketing health care bills.
The health of human societies and the natural environment is strongly related to how robust they are in the face of adverse developments. Resilience derives in large part from diversity. Yet modern societies and economies have pursued specialization to the point where much of our rich biological and cultural diversity has vanished. This is true for livestock and birds as well as for coffee plantations and languages. The 49 trends documented in Vital Signs 2001 provide some measure of that disappearing diversity, and of recent attempts to bolster our resilience.
ECOSYSTEM HEALTH
Decimating forests, damming rivers, draining wetlands, spreading copious amounts of toxic and long-lived materials, and destabilizing the climate have all contributed to an unraveling of Earth's complex ecological safety net.
More than half the world's wetlands vanished during the past century, for example-primarily in the northern hemisphere during the first half and mostly in the South during the second half. (See Figure 1 and pages 96-97.) Half of the remaining coastal wetlands are likely to be lost by 2080 to agriculture, urban sprawl, and rising sea levels as a consequence of climate change. These marshes, bogs, swamps, and peatlands provide a range of vital services: regulating water flow, recharging groundwater supplies, providing flood control, retaining essential nutrients, buffering other ecosystems against contaminants, and offering habitat for diverse biological communities.
The health of coral reefs worldwide is also deteriorating rapidly. (See Figure 2 and pages 92-93.) The share of reefs severely damaged rose from 10 percent as recently as 1992 to 27 percent in late 2000. Reefs provide a range of crucial ecological services and goods. They shelter coastlines from storm damage, erosion, and flooding, serving as protection for an estimated half-billion people, and they provide habitat for as many as 1 million different species. But they are also important feeding and breeding grounds for commercial fisheries, producing one tenth the global fish catch.
The decay of ecosystems sets the stage for more frequent and more devastating "un-natural" disasters-natural disturbances made worse by human actions. (See pages 116-17.) And human vulnerability has increased due to the migration of people to coastal areas and urban centers and the expansion of the built environment. More than one third of humanity dwells within 100 kilometers of a coastline.
Climate change threatens to intensify many of the problems. Coral reefs, for instance, live at the upper edge of their temperature tolerance, and rising ocean temperatures spell greater stress for reefs. Impaired coral reefs are in turn less able to provide shelter against the rising storms associated with climate change. Climate change also expands the geographic reach of the Anopheles mosquito that transmits malaria. (See pages 134-35.)
Fossil fuel combustion has been a major driver of climate change. Although the use of oil, coal, and natural gas has declined slightly-down 0.3 percent from 1998-it is still extremely close to recent peak levels. (See pages 40-41.) One of the main factors is the unabated growth in the number of cars on the world's roads and the distances driven in them, along with inadequate progress in boosting fuel economy to offset these increases. Global automobile production rose 4 percent in 2000 to reach a record 40.9 million vehicles, and the total fleet grew to 532 million. (See pages 68-69.)
With annual carbon emissions from fossil-fuel combustion quadrupling over the past half-century to about 6.3 billion tons in 2000, a total of almost 220 billion tons of carbon have been released into the atmosphere. (See pages 52-53.) Carbon dioxide is only one of several greenhouse gases; chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide play important additional roles. So do perfluorocarbons, released in the process of aluminum smelting-an energy-intensive and polluting process that has expanded 16-fold since 1950. (See pages 64-65.)
In order to stave off full-blown climate change, large-scale reductions in carbon emissions far beyond the 0.6-percent decline achieved in 2000 are needed. Unless drastic action is taken, however, annual emissions are actually expected to grow to 9-12 billion tons by 2020 and possibly to twice that number by 2050. In a new assessment in January 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revised upward its projections for temperature increases during this century, which would make more frequent weather events-both droughts and storms-more likely. (See pages 50-51.)
Modern agriculture, too, is imposing significant environmental burdens. Livestock populations have almost tripled since 1961 and currently contribute 16 percent of total emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. (See pages 100-01.) Traditional mixed farming systems, in which farm animals are kept in close proximity to crop production, allow for animal wastes to be returned to the soil-a practice that has helped maintain soil fertility and limited the need for synthetic fertilizers. Today this approach is often giving way to input-intensive methods. North America and Europe pioneered this industrial production system, but it is now spreading to countries like Brazil, China, and India.
Under the so-called feedlot system, accumulated animal wastes present a major threat to soil, air, and water quality. Groundwater resources are threatened by contamination from the excess nutrients in livestock manure and from agricultural runoff. Water quality worldwide is imperiled by these and a range of other sources that dump nitrates, pesticides, petrochemicals, arsenic, chlorinated solvents, and radioactive wastes into aquifers.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Societies across the planet confront a resurgence of infectious diseases, some well-known and some previously unknown. AIDS and malaria are among the biggest killers, causing the deaths of several million people each year. The spread of microbes that cause these diseases is facilitated by international travel, agricultural trade, and human population movements-all of which are on the upswing. (See pages 62-63 and 142-43.)
Environmental factors also play an important role in human susceptibility to and transmission of diseases, particularly malaria, diarrheal diseases, and acute respiratory infections. Worldwide, close to one fourth of all disabilities can be traced back to such factors as polluted air and water and unsafe food. More than 3 million people die each year worldwide from water-related diseases, mostly in developing countries. (See pages 94-95.)
The AIDS crisis marches on. To date, some 58 million people have been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS; of these, 22 million have succumbed to the disease. (See pages 78-79.) And each year, nearly 6 million additional people are newly infected. Sub-Saharan Africa faces the most severe challenge: it is home to two thirds of the world's HIV-positive population. There, as elsewhere, people living in poverty, minorities, and women are hardest hit by the disease.
Malaria has staged a lethal comeback. (See pages 134-35.) It has been riding the coattails of environmental degradation (logging, dam- and road-building, and the warmer temperatures and increased precipitation associated with climate change) and the social upheaval caused by wars and refugee flows. Malaria remains one of the world's deadliest diseases, each year infecting nearly a half-billion people and claiming more than a million lives. Although close to 40 percent of the world's population is at risk, again inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa are most affected. Among Africans, the death rate from malaria is nine times higher than the global average (see Figure 3), a consequence of higher exposure to disease vectors, the emergence of drug-resistant strains, and the sad fact of grossly inadequate health services.
Increasing drug resistance among microbes that cause a range of deadly illnesses makes many of these diseases harder and more expensive to control and threatens to reverse public health achievements of the past half-century. (See pages 132-33.) A key factor in making microbes more immune to drug treatment is the skyrocketing use of antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs. At least half of all antibiotics used worldwide are believed to be prescribed unnecessarily, partly because of patient demand, but often also as a result of pressure from pharmaceutical companies and health management groups.
Another reason for rising drug resistance is the surging use in agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry of many of the same antibiotics used in human medicine. The ever-present threat of disease outbreaks in feedlots, where livestock are kept in intensive confinement, is strong incentive for massive applications of antibiotics. But farmers also know they can boost livestock growth by mixing antibiotics into animal feed. The practice of intensive feeding of grain, antibiotics, and hormones dramatically cuts the time required for cattle to reach market weight. (See pages 100-01.)
Industrial methods in animal husbandry have come into heavy disrepute in Europe with the outbreak of "mad cow" and foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom and several other nations. Millions of people now question the once routine consumption of meat and meat products and consider industrial livestock production a prime threat to maintaining public health.
The pervasive use of synthetic materials has also triggered concern about health and environmental impacts. One example is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the second most common plastic in the world. (See pages 110-11.) Some 250 million tons are in use today in building materials, packaging, electrical wiring, and many consumer goods, and 100 million tons have already been discarded. Production continues to grow rapidly-rising 39 percent between 1992 and 1999. But both PVC production and disposal generate highly toxic waste products. Dioxins, furans, and other compounds pollute the air, can leach into the soil and bodies of water, or can be ingested by plants, fish, and people. Consumers, governments, and private companies are increasingly questioning the use of PVCs, particularly since alternatives exist for most applications.
Illnesses induced by lifestyle choices are another key public health concern. Each year, 4 million people die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses. World cigarette production remains near record levels, though per capita supplies are down more than 10 percent over the past decade. (See pages 76-77.) Although growing numbers of people in industrial nations reject smoking, cigarette sales in developing countries are on a strong upward trajectory. China is the world's leading consumer of cigarettes. But the increase in smoking is especially pronounced in Africa-if current growth rates continue over the next two decades, more Africans could die from tobacco-related illnesses than from AIDS, malaria, and childbirth complications combined.
Increasingly sedentary lifestyles are a key factor behind a new global epidemic: overweight and obesity, its more extreme form. (See pages 136-37.) Obesity closely correlates with trends in television viewing and car ownership, both of which indicate a lack of adequate physical activity. Inadequate exercise, together with high consumption of sugar and fat, explains why one out of six people worldwide is now considered overweight. This is a major factor behind chronic diseases such as stroke, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, which exert strong upward pressure on health care costs. Although these diseases of affluence are found predominantly in industrial countries, developing countries are increasingly affected: the World Health Organization predicts that chronic diseases will surpass infectious ones as a burden on developing countries over the next quarter-century.
Health care expenditures have grown rapidly over the past 50 years, outpacing the growth of the overall economy and becoming one of its largest sectors. (See pages 138-39.) Skyrocketing health care outlays are in part driven by rising costs for prescription drugs. At the same time, health expenditures are heavily skewed toward the wealthier parts of humanity; hundreds of millions of poor people have no access to basic and affordable care.
The best-selling drugs are designed to treat First World illnesses, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and indigestion. Seeing a market without much purchasing power, pharmaceutical companies have tended to neglect the health needs of large chunks of the planet, including research on malaria vaccines. (See pages 106-07.) Only 1 percent of 1,233 new drugs that reached the market between 1975 and 1997 were approved specifically for tropical diseases. Roughly one third of humanity lacks regular access to essential drugs; one fourth of all children do not receive routine immunization with the six basic vaccines against polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, and tuberculosis.
ECONOMIC HEALTH
Ecosystem breakdown and a rising disease burden are increasingly taxing economic health, particularly that of poorer countries and of the poor within all societies. In the worst cases, environmental and health deterioration could trigger economic decay and social fragmentation, and perhaps even political upheaval.
The past 50 years have seen a dramatic increase in great disasters, which as noted earlier have increasingly been helped along by the human hand. At more than $600 billion, the economic toll of natural disasters during the 1990s alone was more than that of the previous four decades combined. (See pages 116-17.) More than 2 billion people worldwide were affected by disasters in the 1990s.
Untreated yet treatable diseases not only cause unnecessary illness, suffering, and premature death, they also represent an economic burden. For example, African economies have lost an estimated $100 billion over the past 35 years due to malaria alone-losses that many of these struggling economies can ill afford. (See pages 134-35.) Resistant infections are costlier to treat than regular ones, and translate into prohibitive costs in poorer countries. The cost differential between highly resistant and regular strains of tuberculosis, for instance, can be as high as 100. (See pages 132-33.) As infectious diseases spread and more drug-resistant strains emerge, the prospect is one of escalating costs.
AIDS is killing the most economically productive people-the young, a cornerstone of any country's work force. The disease also has a devastating impact on education prospects in many countries. It is responsible for 70 percent of the deaths of teachers in Côte d'Ivoire, for instance. (See pages 148-49.) This epidemic, in concert with other diseases, threatens to overwhelm the feeble health systems of many developing countries. In just two decades, AIDS has erased a half-century's gains in life expectancy in many African nations. The impacts are severe enough to threaten social stability in nations that are already reeling economically and hard hit by violent conflicts raging on their territories. (See pages 82-83.)
The explosive rise in drug costs is affecting health care systems worldwide, making the profits (and great profitability) of the drug industry an increasingly controversial political issue. (See pages 106-07.) Reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals is a life-and-death issue for the poor. The need to make treatment affordable is particularly urgent for the millions of people living with HIV/AIDS. But this has turned into a high-stakes battle for markets and public opinion. Although a few pharmaceutical companies have agreed to reduce prices, many others-focused on their bottom lines-have opposed cheaper generic drugs offered by companies in Brazil and India.
The specter of unaffordable drugs would appear to be a paradox in a world that ostensibly grows richer year after year. The world economy has expanded sevenfold since 1950, from $6 trillion to $43 trillion in 2000 (in 1999 dollars). (See pages 56-57.) But gross national product is clearly not a good indicator of how sound an economy is, how well people's current needs are being met, and how people will fare in the future. In fact, the economy is growing in part because the rising expenditures to deal with environmental and social calamities are counted as if they contributed to, rather than subtracted from, human well-being.
Economic health depends not just on a sufficiently large economic pie, but also on how that pie is sliced. The rewards and amenities that the economy provides continue to be divided up in extremely unequal fashion. In recent years, stock markets became increasingly prominent, with their capitalization rising to rival the size of the world economy by the late 1990s, driving a consumption boom in the United States and other western economies. (See pages 112-13.) But highly unequal stock ownership has contributed to a widening of wealth disparities not seen in many decades. And the volatility of equities markets that has been seen in recent months can potentially wreak havoc in an economy and distort social and economic development.
Even as the global economy continued on its upward trajectory, many developing countries were hard pressed to cover the basics. Following the largest single-year increase in 1998, the foreign debt of these nations remained high in 1999-$2.6 trillion. (See Figure 4 and pages 58-59.) While Latin American countries have managed to reduce their debt burden in recent years, other developing and former Eastern bloc nations have not. And sub-Saharan Africa confronts the specter of debt eating away at an ever growing share of its economy.
Many developing countries are struggling with an endless slide in the prices that their raw materials fetch in the world market; 65 nations rely on a single commodity for 40 percent or more of their foreign-exchange income. (See pages 122-23.) On average, nonfuel commodity prices are at less than half their mid-1970s level, and at only one third their 1900 level. Consequently, exporting countries have had to sell ever larger amounts of raw materials to make up for the decline in prices; in fact, so many have pursued the same export-oriented strategy that prices have been weakened even more. In the quest for export revenues-needed to pay off ballooning foreign debts-the environment has become a casualty of stepped-up mining, logging, and other resource extraction operations.
World coffee production, for instance, hit an all-time record in 2000. (See pages 36-37.) The higher yields that powered much of this growth have largely come from a shift from traditional mixed-use plots shaded by trees to larger areas of land where coffee is grown in monoculture fashion in the full sun. This has contributed to deforestation, to loss of biodiversity, and, because of heavier use of fertilizers and pesticides, to water pollution and the poisoning of farmland.
Food trade has grown particularly fast, quadrupling in volume and nearly tripling in dollar value since 1961. (See pages 62-63.) But falling world market prices for agricultural products have thrown many farmers in developing and industrial nations into rising debt, even as local food markets are increasingly embattled by cheap imports frequently controlled by a handful of transnational corporations.
SOLUTIONS
Even as the challenges to environmental, public, and economic health are rising, it is becoming clear what some of the solutions might look like. Vital Signs 2001 discusses a number of these.
The rise in the prominence of stock markets and the growing influence of private corporations has motivated efforts to promote socially and environmentally responsible investing. (See pages 114-15.) This has taken a number of forms, including the channeling of money into investment funds that screen companies according to a variety of criteria, such as labor standards, environmental protection, and human rights. Many of these funds attempt to screen out the tobacco and military industries in particular. In the United States, money invested according to social and environmental criteria grew to about $2 trillion in 1999, or about one eighth of the total funds under professional management in the nation. Using a different approach, shareholder activists have tried to steer corporate policy toward more sustainable practices, introducing shareholder resolutions on issues like climate change, old-growth forests, genetically engineered organisms, and tobacco.
Whereas efforts to promote more responsible investment paths aim at the realms of high finance, microcredit initiatives try to help the poor overcome poverty and health problems. (See pages 110-11.) Microcredit, the provision of small-scale financial services to those not served by commercial banks and other lenders, is expanding rapidly. Almost 24 million people found assistance through such programs in 1999 (see Table 1), and the aim is to reach 100 million by 2005. Some of the most effective programs combine income-generating activities with educational efforts, covering such topics as immunization against infectious diseases, diarrhea prevention, and HIV/AIDS counseling. Microcredit programs offer particular hope to women, who account for a disproportionate share of the recipients of small-scale loans. Although such loans hold considerable promise, it is also clear that they alone cannot serve the needs of the extremely poor; improved social security programs are still essential. (See pages 150-51.)
Besides socially responsible investment endeavors, there are also "ethical" consumer initiatives. Support for organically grown and "fair trade" coffee (produced under fair price and working conditions), though a small share of global coffee sales, is expanding rapidly. Such efforts are crucial to support coffee-growing that does not damage the environment irreparably or cause grave harm to the health of millions of coffee growers and workers. (See pages 36-37.)
Modern chemistry is no longer regarded as an unblemished blessing. Now efforts are directed at limiting or stopping the use of compounds that have proved to be highly toxic. In December 2000, officials from 122 nations signed a treaty to phase out a dozen of the most dangerous chemicals ever created, which are part of a group called persistent organic pollutants. The pesticide DDT is to be eliminated under this agreement. But since it has been used in malaria control efforts, some temporary exemptions were granted until alternatives can be phased in. The 1998 Roll Back Malaria Program, initiated by the World Bank and others, combines safer chemicals and nonchemical tools with efforts to strengthen public health systems. (See pages 134-35.)
A number of products and materials that carry high health risks or whose impacts are uncertain are attracting increasing scrutiny, and sometimes rejection, by consumers. This has been the case for PVC plastics, cigarettes, meat (following highly publicized outbreaks of mad cow disease and growing concern over the use of antibiotics in feed), and genetically modified crops.
In previous editions of Vital Signs, we have noted the promise that emerging wind power and solar electricity technologies hold for shifting away from our heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Though still contributing only a small share of the world's energy, both continued to surge in 2000. (See pages 44-47.) Ten times as much electricity is generated through wind power now as in 1990, and production of photovoltaic or solar cells is 10 times larger than in 1987. For now, applications of these innovative energy sources are concentrated in industrial countries.
Efficiency improvements are as crucial as developing renewable sources of energy. In Vital Signs 2001, we report on energy use in aluminum production, one of the most energy-intensive industries on Earth. (See pages 64-65.) Producing aluminum from recycled materials takes only 5 percent as much energy as producing it from bauxite ore. Recycled aluminum now accounts for 26 percent of total aluminum production, up just slightly from 21 percent in 1950 (and much of this is from aluminum scrap rather than "post-consumer" materials). A major expansion of post-consumer recycling is both possible and necessary in order to rein in the industry's large energy consumption.
Reducing the extreme reliance on cars in modern transportation could also save substantial amounts of energy. Recovering from a three-year decline, global bicycle production in 2000 rose by 22 percent, buoyed by rising purchases in China, Europe, and the United States. (See pages 70-71.) Bicycling also has important health benefits for people who need to lose weight. Another alternative to the automobile, urban light rail, is becoming increasingly popular. (See pages 126-27.) In Western Europe, a decades-long decline in this form of transportation has been reversed, and in the United States, light-rail riders are the fastest-growing segment of public transit riders. In combination, light rail systems and bicycling offer an attractive alternative to cars in many urban settings, provided that population densities are sufficiently high.
Finally, meeting the triple health challenge and achieving sustainability is not only about better technologies. Awareness and spiritual commitment to saving the planet and its inhabitants are critical. Religious communities of all different faiths are becoming a significant force for environmental change. (See pages 146-47.) Activities range from advocating sustainable resource use to supporting efforts to protect Earth's biological heritage, improving the stewardship of the estimated 5 percent of the world's land directly owned or controlled by religious groups, spurring green markets, and promoting energy alternatives. Many of these efforts derive from a desire to restore balance to the relationship of humans and their natural environment in a world that all too often worships at the altar of unbridled consumerism. The holistic nature of religious teachings helps reinforce the understanding that solutions will be most effective if they address environmental, human, and economic health together.
source: Worldwatch Institute http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/vs/vs01/VSexcerpt.html 31may01
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