6,000,000,000 Consumption Machines - environmental aspects of population growth

Researchers at Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom have determined that humanity's demand for forest products is already 25 percent beyond the point of sustainable consumption. What this means is that given population and income growth in the developing world and continued demand for forest products in the industrialized world, the future of the world's frontier forests and all the ecosystem benefits they provide to humankind are in jeopardy.

Sustainable Living

Increasingly, core forest areas are being set aside as sustainably exploited reserves to enable indigenous people to generate income. In Ecuador's Andes, Queche Indians gather more than 3,600 plant species for use in pharmaceuticals and traditional medicines, leading to regionwide conservation. The Queche also use forests for building materials and agro-forestry products.

AIR

Dark Skies, Changing Climates

CLEAN AIR is the life-giving resource most people take for granted. Yet increasingly, as human population spirals and consumption rises, the air we breathe is becoming both an agent of illness and the vehicle for modifying Earth's climate.

Few experts dispute the simple fact that more people means more air pollution. Even with the availability of vastly improved technologies to limit pollution, population growth translates directly into more use of energy, more cars on the road, more factories and hence more dirty urban air.

In turn, that often results in severe health problems. Today, more than one billion people suffer from dangerously high air-pollution levels. Most of those live in sprawling Third World cities where industries and power plants have few, if any, pollution controls and where traffic jams are a perpetual feature of urban life. Up to 700,000 of those people die every year from the air they breathe.

Cities such as Bangkok, Manila and Beijing are often entombed in a sickening pall spewed out from a rapidly growing fleet of vehicles and uncontrolled industrial emissions. In these cities and 17 others, air pollution -- most commonly in the form of sulfur oxides, oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and ozone -- is one of the leading causes of respiratory infections and premature death. Just breathing the air in Mexico City has the same health effect as smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

On the consumption side, the distribution of energy is uneven. Currently, the richest fifth of humanity consumes close to 60 percent of the world's energy, while the poorest fifth uses just 4 percent. The benefits of the fossil-fuel revolution, which drives industrial nations, have still not reached a full third of humanity -- the two billion people who must burn fuelwood and organic waste for heating, cooking and lighting.

The other side of the atmospheric pollution problem is climate change, often called global warming. When carbon from burning of wood, coal, oil and other fossil fuels is released into the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for two-thirds of human-induced changes in the world's climate. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in 1997 reached 363.6 parts per million, the highest in more than 160,000 years.