Time to act

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1991 by Francesco di Castri

ENVIRONMENTAL problems have been a major international preoccupation ever since the United Nations Conference on the Environment was held in Stockholm in June 1972. That Conference took place in a climate of optimism and determination to act.

Action was indeed taken: international organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) were created; Ministries of the Environment came into being; and ecologically-minded political movements emerged. The results, judged in terms of the volume of publications that have appeared, the knowledge that has been acquired, and the number of reforestation and drainage projects that have been carried out in the newly-established protected zones, have undeniably been important. And yet, paradoxically, our environment has continued to deteriorate. Local successes have been recorded here and there, but the current situation is much more critical than it was twenty years ago.

In the industrialized countries, water is contaminated by chemicals, soils are degraded by excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers, coastlines are disfigured by ill-planned urbanization, forests are destroyed and lakes made sterile by acid rain, health is threatened by the accumulation and transport of toxic wastes, cities are choked with traffic and asphyxiated by air pollution. The developing countries are confronted with problems of desertification, the erosion and salinization of soils, floods, the extinction of animal and plant species, particularly in tropical regions. Shanty-towns proliferate, with their attendant poverty, disease and delinquency.

All these problems, both in the North and in the South, are linked by a common thread. They arise from inappropriate development choices. Of course, the problems are far more flagrant in the South, because demographic pressure there is far higher than in the North. But the true origin of these problems is planetary in nature, and is connected with the interdependence of economies, the competitive interactions of international markets, monetary disorder, and the thorny issue of foreign debt.

Some thirty years from now, the human race, whose numbers will by then have reached ten or twelve billion, will be affected by the emergence of environmental problems which will also be of a global nature: probable disturbance of the climate owing to the greenhouse effect (caused by the increase in the amounts of trace gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere), the depletion of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, and the irreversible impoverishment of biological diversity.

We are thus faced with extremely complex issues, in some cases uncertain and unpredictable, all highly dependent on one another, and changing rapidly on a planetary scale. And yet our institutions of education, research, administration and management have not been designed to face problems of this type. Even with a considerable increase in funds, it is unlikely that we shall be to solve them immediately. The key to a solution is not conjunctural but structural.

To tackle the crucial problems of the environment effectively calls for an interdisciplinary approach which few institutions can provide at the present time. Research bodies and universities are in thrall to evaluation systems strictly compartmentalized according to discipline, and there is a widening gap between university training and research on the one hand and the real needs of society on the other. Very little current research in this field has an effective application, either because in most cases it does not address the true problems, or because it is not integrated into the decision-making and management processes, or because it is not adapted to the compartmentalization of administrative structures.

No discipline, not event ecology, can claim alone to apprehend all the planetary economic and social ramifications of environmental problems, no research body or administrative service can consider itself to be self-sufficient in this field. No country, not even the most powerful, can claim to resolve problems whose causes and effects lie in other countries, nor prevent their repercussions on its territory. Yet most disciplines ignore one another or are rivals in the search for research funding. The profession withdraw into their traditional corporatism, ministries are divided into sectors virtually impermeable to interaction, and countries only agree on insufficient norms for protection.

In these conditions it is easier to solve a few immediate or partial problems than to succee4d in establishing institutions really capable of managing and overcoming what has to be called the environmental crisis.

MUST THERE BE

AN ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE

BEFORE WE ACT?

Technical solutions exist for most of the problems, even if they meet psychological and structural resistance and clash with powerful and contradictory economic interests. Perhaps we shall take the necessary measures in time, as public opinion and economic and political circles gradually become aware of what is at stake. It is more likely, however, that we shall wait until a far greater shock occurs than any we have yet known. It would be most regrettable if our collective instinct for survival could only be aroused in the face of a major ecological catastrophe.