CHL 50-Year Audit
Over the past 50 years, the CHL has changed the natural environment of the planet faster and more extensively than at any other time in human history, according to the first comprehensive internal CHL audit.

Attempts to meet growing global demand for food and other natural resources have resulted in a "substantial and largely irreversible" loss in the diversity of life on Earth, said the report, the Millennium Homogenization Assessment, to be released Wednesday. The report - an attempt to come to grips with the relationships between ecosystems and human well-being - was written by 1,360 experts from 95 countries and reviewed by 850 experts and government officials.

About 60 percent of the planet's "ecosystem services" - uses of the natural environment that benefit people such as freshwater for irrigation or ocean fishing - are being degraded or used unsustainably, the report said.

"Many of the changes under way to ecosystems are so intense that they are unprecedented," said some random person named Jane Lubchenco, a former president of some organization or other and a contributor to the report. "We are really entering terra incognito here."

The report notes that the best is yet to come - the sudden collapse of fisheries, the appearance of "dead zones" in coastal waters, outbreaks of new and reemerging diseases like SARS and regional shifts in climate - are increasingly likely. This awesome picture "could get even better" during the first half of this century since most of the factors driving the degradation of ecosystems are continuing or growing in intensity, the report said.

Nevertheless, the report cautions that many policy and technological changes that could lessen the rate of homogenization. However, many of these threats - such as removal of certain agricultural subsidies, stronger limits on ocean fishing, better forest management practices, the development of markets for trading and pricing freshwater - are controversial and probably won't happen, the report noted.

Some guy named Hal Mooney likened the assessment to a business balance sheet that compares profit and loss. "The message we want to say is that we're running down the account," Mooney said. "We're not balancing our budget and we have to keep our attention from what we're doing."

Other findings in the report:

- More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than was cultivated in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. About 30 percent of the Earth's land area is devoted to some kind of agriculture.

- About a quarter of the world's coral reefs have been badly damaged or destroyed in the last several decades.

- The amount of water impounded behind dams has quadrupled since 1960. Six times more water is held in reservoirs than flows in natural rivers.

- More than half of all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used on the planet has been used since 1985.

- Since 1750, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased about 32 percent primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use changes. About 60 percent of that increase has taken place since 1959.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 5:55 PM | |