Foreword

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Chairman, Green Cross International

Five years ago, all 191 United Nations member states pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability. These critical challenges were reaffirmed by health officials from across the globe in October 2004 at the tenth anniversary of the landmark International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo.

The overarching conclusion from this 2004 meeting was that while considerable, albeit erratic, progress was indeed being made in many areas, any optimism must be tempered with the realization that gains in overall global socioeconomic development, security, and sustainability do not reflect the reality on the ground in many parts of the world. Poverty continues to undermine progress in many areas. Diseases such as HIV/AIDnextricably linked to the ecological and social problems she has devoted her life to addressing. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement to organize poor women to plant millions of trees—the group's goals included replenishing Kenya's dwindling forests, providing desperately needed cooking fuel, and making women active participants in improving their lives and those of their families.

Maathai's success and her subsequent challenge to government conservation policies put her in direct conflict with the country's autocratic president. She and her followers were beaten and jailed—but in the process they spurred thousands of followers to action in Kenya and around the globe. The civil society movement that Wangari Maathai leads helped pave the way for Kenya's peaceful transition from virtual dictatorship to elected government in 2003. Capping the historic transition, she is now a member of the Kenyan parliament and assistant environment minister in the current government.

By coincidence, the Nobel Peace Price was announced just as we were putting the finishing touches on State of the World 2005—the twenty-second edition of our annual book and the first to focus on global security, the topic that has so dominated private and political discourse over the past few years. As longtime admirers of the Green Belt Movement, my colleagues and I were heartened by the news of Wangari Maathai's award, and inspired by the hope that this latest Nobel Prize will help convince millions of people around the world to stop viewing global security as something that can be safeguarded solely through diplomatic skills or military power.

Our focus in the pages that follow is on the deeper roots of insecurity—many of them found in the destabilization of human societies and the natural world that has accompanied the explosive growth in human numbers and resource demands over the past several decades. Drawing on the varied expertise and insights of our own staff, as well as on a record number of collaborators from around the world, we have sought to unravel the often hidden links between such disparate phenomena as falling water tables, the spread of AIDS, transnational crime, environmental refugees, terrorism, and climate change. In doing so, we have found ample reason to fear that the profound insecurity that has gripped the world for the past three years may grow even deeper in the years ahead.

Demographic imbalances are one destabilizing force. As Lisa Mastny and Richard Cincotta describe in the second chapter, in roughly one third of the world's countries—most of them in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia—a large generation of teenagers is faced with limited economic prospects and often little in the way of education. Most of the world's civil wars, emigration, and terrorism emerge from those countries—exacerbated in many cases by ethnic and religious differences and by the breakdown of the social and ecological systems people depend on.

In many of these same countries, the spread of infectious diseases, particularly AIDS, is also tearing societies apart, killing many of the young people who are best equipped to lead their nations forward economically and politically. Growing human pressures on natural resources—triggering the collapse of fisheries and the drying up of rivers, for example—are further undermining some societies. The latest humanitarian crisis to hit the world's headlines in 2004 was in Darfur in Sudan, where the immediate clashes between Arab nomads and African villagers was preceded by years of desertification that led herders to encroach on farmland to their south, heightening tensions and eventually leading to open conflict, forced eviction of villagers, and genocide.

Access to oil is another cause of instability that has commanded recent attention. The dramatic run-up in prices to over $50 per barrel in the fall of 2004 coincided with growing instability in the Persian Gulf, where the world's richest oil resources are located. The dominance of the oil industry in the Middle East has undermined the economic and political development of the region while flooding it with petrodollars that have increased economic disparities and financed the rise of terrorism. The dependence of the United States and Europe on Middle Eastern oil has led to highly skewed economic flows and heavy military investments that have created deep resentments on both sides. The prospect of world oil production beginning a long decline within the next decade, just when large countries like China and India stake their claims to remaining reserves, would be reason enough for concern even without the crisis caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Together, they have created a global powder keg.

The possibility of disruptive climate change may be an even greater threat to the security of societies. Amid new signs of accelerated global warming—from the rapid melting of Arctic ice to the spread of s and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than by the limits of technology and consumerism. I am delighted that the Worldwatch Institute continues to address these important challenges and goals in its annual State of the World report. I urge all readers to seriously consider their personal commitments to action after finishing this volume. Only with the active and dedicated participation of civil society will we be successful in building a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for the twenty-first century and beyond.