State of the World 2003

January 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05173-0
241 pages

Print Version$16.95Add to Cart

"The most comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible summaries...on the global environment."
E. O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize winner

If we are going to reverse biodiversity loss, dampen the effects of global warming, and eliminate the scourge of persistent poverty, we need to reinvent ourselves—as individuals, as societies, as corporations, and as governments.

In this 20th anniversary edition of a Worldwatch classic, the Institute’s highly respected interdisciplinary research team argues that past successes—such as the elimination of smallpox and the encouraging drop in birth rates in many countries—prove that humanity is capable of redirecting itself in positive ways.

Most encouraging, the world is sitting on the cusp of similar successes that could usher in a sustainable human civilization. The use of clean, renewable energy technologies, like wind turbines and photovoltaics for example, is growing at over 25 percent per year, and they are increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Organic farming is the fastest-growing sector of the world agricultural economy, with the potential to rejuvenate rural communities from the Philippines to Sweden. And a quickening of religious interest in

The challenges are still immense, of course, as the book also documents, but the building blocks for a historic reinvention of human civilization are now within reach.

Chapter 1: A History of Our Future

Chris Bright

The environmental and social challenges we face today—from population to pollution to ecological decline—are enormous, but not intractable. As history demonstrates, people are capable of fundamental change for the better.

A barrier to change is that damage assessments often have an air of unreality because they bear little obvious relation to life as we ordinarily live it. A great deal of environmental degradation cannot be seen. Large economies tend to displace the ill effects of behavior from the behavior itself. Few of us ever encounter the toxic waste, soil degradation, or unsustainable mining and logging that support our collective consumption patterns.

It is not that hard, however, to envision the paths that reform will have to take. For example, in the energy economy, the path to reform leads away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources, and in materials production, away from primary reliance on mining and more on recycling.

Despite the obvious need for change, and despite our obvious technical competence, it can still be hard to believe that real, fundamental change is possible. And yet such change does occur, even though it can be difficult to appreciate because it is so readily taken for granted. For example, who today remembers the campaign to eradicate smallpox?

Chapter 2: Watching Birds Disappear

Howard Youth

Prominent scientists consider the world to be in the midst of the biggest wave of animal extinctions since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. This phenomenon is clearly reflected in the extinction of birds, which is now topping 50 times the natural rate of loss. Over the past 500 years 128 bird species have vanished and 103 of these have been lost since 1800.

These disappearances mark not only the loss of unique species, but also the unraveling of delicate natural balances. Besides providing invaluable goods and services within their habitats, birds serve as valuable indicators of environmental change as well. Their population declines often reflect environmental degradation.

An array of phenomena accelerates the erals is even more imposing. On average, producing a single gold ring, for example, generates about 3 tons of wastes at a minesite.

Fortunately, the world doesn't need to obtain minerals in a way that uses so much energy and generates so much pollution. Through improved design of cities, transport, homes, and products, societies can find ways to use the existing stock of minerals far more efficiently—and to use smaller amounts of materials overall—dramatically reducing the need to mine underground ores.

Metals, for instance, are eminently recyclable. Used copper or aluminum can be transformed back into the same amount of metal with very little additional supplement of new metal. It takes 95 percent less energy to produce alumin

  • Bullets, Cages, Hooks, and Chemicals
  • Modern Conveniences and Climate Change
  • Flying Straight: For Birds and Humanity

    • Chapter 3: Linking Population, Women, and Biodiversity

    Mia MacDonald, Danielle Nierenberg

    The interplay among population growth, biodiversity loss, and gender roles is complex. But at the core, gender inequity tends to exacerbate population growth, and population increases tend to put pressure on the natural environment, including biological resources.

    Over the past decade, several global agreements have acknowledged the need to include population realities in sustainable development planning. These agreements have also noted the central role that increasing women's status plays in lowering fertility and ensuring the sound management of natural resources.

    Yet large scale or significant progress toward goals set at such conferences has been slow due to deficiencies in promised funding or political will. In the developing world, women are often the first to feel the effects of environmental degradation since they are the ones who rely on trees, grasses, water, and a variety of plants to meet daily household needs.

    In order to head off future collisions between population, consumption, and biodiversity, swift and sure action will be needed in a number of areas, and at policy and program levels. These include targeting areas of high biodiversity for larger-scale improvements in reproductive health, education, and women’s rights and abilities to participate in natural resource management. Also important are encouraging decision-makers and program managers to work across distinct sectors like health and environment, and development of national policies and public information programs aimed at better aligning consumption patterns and biodiversity conservation. Policy innovations, too, could support the scaling up of current programs to maximize their reach and impact.

    Chapter 4: Combating Malaria

    Anne Platt McGinn

    Malaria, one of humanity’s oldest scourges, is making a strong global comeback, killing up to 7,000 people a day (more than AIDS)_primarily children in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria has become resistant to most anti-malarial drugs, making treatment vastly more complicated and expensive. Poverty, war, and civil strife make it hard for governments to implement preventive and curative measures. And people are not making use of safe, effective, and affordable ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the disease.

    Bringing this disease under control will require creative strategies and far more resources than are currently available. (Malaria is a disease of poor countries and thus tends to be under-researched: between 1979 and 1999, only four of the 1,393 new drugs developed worldwide were anti-malarials.) Despite the largely global phase-out of DDT, the insecticide remains an important tool for malaria control in epidemics in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

    On the front lines in Africa, governments are reducing the incidence of malaria by helping people acquire bednets treated with insecticides less toxic than DDT. Sleeping under a bednet radically reduces the number of infective mosquito bites a person suffers. The Mexican government has mounted a sophisticated program against malaria that combines community involvement, widespread prevention, locally tailored treatments, and the use of the least toxic option first. Through programs like the UN’s Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria, the developed world has begun to provide the much-needed increase in financial resources.

    Chapter 5: Charting a New Energy Future

    Janet Sawin

    Renewable energy technologies have the potential to meet world energy demand many times over and are now ready for use on a large scale. The transition from today’s mix of fossil fuels, nuclear, and big hydropower to renewables would significantly reduce the threats that today’s fuel sources pose to the environment, public health and welfare, and international political stability.

    The fossil fuel industry and governments of most oil-producing nations and major fossil fuel users like the United States have long argued that renewables were not a credible alternative. But it is difficult to claim that something is impossible once it has already occurred.

    From Germany to rural China, renewable energy, especially wind power and solar (photovoltaic) power, has come of age. After more than a decade of double-digit growth, renewable energy is a multibillion-dollar global business. Wind power is leading the way in many nations, generating more than 20 percent of the electricity needs in some regions and countries, and is cost-competitive with many conventional energy technologies. Solar cells are already the most affordable option for getting modern energy services to hundreds of millions of people in developing countries.

    Chapter 6: Scrapping Mining Dependence

    Payal Sampat

    If an accountant were to weigh the costs and benefits of extracting minerals from the Earth and then processing and refining them, the balance sheet would reveal this: an industry that consumes close to 10 percent of world energy, spews almost half of all toxic emissions in some countries, and threatens nearly 40 percent of the world's undeveloped tracts of forest. Mining is also the world's most deadly occupation: on average, 40 mine workers are killed on the job each day and many more are injured.

    Today, minerals are extracted and consumed in enormous quantities: in 1999, some 9.6 billion tons of marketable minerals were dug out of the Earth, nearly twice as much as in 1970. The amount of wastes generated in order to extract these mine, three times more gold sits in bank vaults, in jewelry boxes, and with private investors, than is identified in underground reserves.

    Chapter 7: Uniting Divided Cities

    Molly O’Meara Sheehan

    Unable to afford “formal” dwellings, as many as 1 billion people worldwide seek shelter in “informal” settlements, often in the most precarious places_ on steep hillsides or floodplains, in garbage dumps, or downstream from industrial polluters_ living not only with the constant threat of possible eviction but also the risks of natural disasters and disease from lack of water and toilets.

    While cities of the industrial North claimed all slots in the list of the 10 largest cities in 1900, by 2001 only Tokyo and New York remained on that list. Urban centers in the developing South now dominate the ranks of the world’s largest cities. Demographers expect that by 2015, Los Angeles and Shanghai will be bumped from the 10, as Karachi and Jakarta move up.

    Governments could do much more to help their poorest citizens feel secure in their own homes, make a living, and improve their environment. And in doing so, the world’s relatively poorer cities could well leapfrog their wealthier counterparts to create an urban development model that values both people and nature.

    Worldwide, poor people's voices are rising in various political arenas. From Bombay to Buenos Aires, slum residents are organizing to fight for greater rights and better lives.

    Chapter 8: Engaging Religion in the Quest for a Sustainable World

    Gary Gardner

    Spiritual traditions--from large, centralized religions to local tribal spiritual authorities--are beginning to devote energy to building just and environmentally healthy societies. Worldwide, the major faiths are issuing declarations, advocating for new national policies, and designing educational activities in support of a sustainable world--sometimes in partnership with the secular environmental community.

    Religious institutions bring at least five strong assets to the effort to build a sustainable world: the capacity to shape worldviews, moral authority, a large base of adherents, significant material resources, and community building capacity.

    While the religious and scientific communities have historically diverged and have been suspicious of each other, issues like deforestation, climate change, and poverty have led religious and environmental communities to appreciate their common interest in combating such problems. This trend is hopeful and could represent the budding emergence of a powerful new alliance for sustainability.

    As many religions begin to show interest in building a sustainable world, secular advocates of sustainability are becoming somewhat more receptive to spiritual appeals. This openness could reintroduce a passionate voice to the environmental movement that would build a spiritual/emotional connection between the public and the natural environment.