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June 11, 2008
Green Car Congress: Report: The Economic Costs of Deteriorating Ecosystems
Among other red flags, the report's researchers found:
* Globally, forests have shrunk by approximately 40% in the last three centuries, having completely disappeared in 25 countries; another 29 countries have lost more than 90% of their forest cover.
* About 50% of the planet's wetlands have been lost in the past century, with increasing pressure in the last half-century to convert tropical and sub-tropical wetlands to alternative land use.
* Around a third of the world's coral reefs--which can have higher levels of biodiversity than even tropical forests--have been seriously damaged through fishing, pollution, disease and coral bleaching; another 25% are in immediate danger of the same fate.
* More than a third of the world's mangroves have disappeared in the last two decades; in some countries, the loss is up to 80%, via conversion for aquaculture, over-exploitation and storms.
* The Earth is currently undergoing its sixth mass extinction event, which has the distinction of being the only one that has been human-induced. The rate of manmade species extinction is estimated to be 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction which is typical of Earth's long-term history.The net effect is that more than half of the world's life-giving ecosystems, which operate in interdependent ways that are not fully understood by science, have deteriorated in the last half-century, primarily as a result of human impacts. In their introduction to the report, Stavros Dimas and Sigmar Gabriel bluntly assert that "we are, so to speak, erasing nature's hard drive without even knowing what data it contains."
Green Car Congress: Report: The Economic Costs of Deteriorating Ecosystems
Posted by thdyck at June 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack