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Worldwatch papers cover a wide range of topics but all feature the insightful analysis you rely on. Worldwatch has explored issues like automobile alternatives, urbanization, and sustainable development far in advance of the current popular debates. Track these hot topics back to the Worldwatch's first authoritative reports, and see how the issues have developed through the years.
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Urbanization and International Development
Worldwatch Paper #167: Sustainable Development for the Second World: Ukraine and the Nations in Transition
The 27 nations of the Second World-the former Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellites-are undergoing a wrenching transition following the collapse of communism. The process is complicated by the history and legacy of communist rule, including severe economic, governance, and environmental problems. In some of these countries, such as Ukraine, the upheaval has led to a period of predatory capitalism and declining living standards. But the same turmoil offers an opportunity to change course and institute reform according to the principles of sustainable development-the only path that can lead to the twin goals of long-term human and environmental wellbeing.
Worldwatch Paper #159: Traveling Light: New Paths for International Tourism
In today's rapidly shrinking world, travelers are trading in over-commercialized mass tourism for more exotic destinations-most of which are in the developing world. From South America to Asia, countries are rushing to capitalize on a wealth of cultural and biological attractions in order to meet this demand.
Worldwatch Paper #156: City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl
Today, every world region suffers from sprawling, car-choked urban areas. Accidents and pollution-related illness take lives, while traffic delays sap human productivity and waste fuel. Part of the reason that Americans now guzzle 43 percent of the world's gasoline is to wheel around expansive metropolises. Transportation, spurred by road traffic, is now the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.
Worldwatch Paper #155: Still Waiting for the Jubilee: Pragmatic Solutions for the Third World Debt Crisis
Since the end of World War II, the richest countries have lent the poorest ones hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it in the name of democracy, freedom, and development. Yet scores of the borrowing countries are now mired in debt and poverty-some 47, according to World Bank benchmarks, all but 10 of them African. Together, they owe $422 billion, or $380 per person-a substantial sum for them, but just 11 months of military spending for western governments.
Worldwatch Paper #150: Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition
For the first time in human history, the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people, according to a forthcoming report from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization. While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.
Worldwatch Paper #77: The Future of Urbanization: Facing the Ecological and Economic Constraints
Human Rights and Security
Worldwatch Paper #158: Unnatural Disasters
In the 1990s, natural catastrophes like hurricanes, floods, and fires caused over $608 billion in economic losses worldwide, an amount greater than during the previous four decades combined. But a growing share of this devastation is not 'natural' at all: the effects of a disaster are magnified by ecologically destructive practices, like degrading forests, engineering rivers, filling in wetlands, and destabilizing the climate. And at the same time, continuing human migration to cities and coastal areas is putting more and more people and infrastructure at risk. The projected effects of climate change and sea level rise can only heighten coastal risks.
Worldwatch Paper #146: Ending Violent Conflict
The Cold War is over, little has changed fundamentally as far as reliance on the military is concerned. Thus, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the international community faces a fundamental challenge: either build the foundations for a lasting peace or be overwhelmed by an endless string of internal wars capable of devastating entire countries, even of re-igniting big-power confrontations. And as events in the Balkans have demonstrated, current peace and security policies are woefully inadequate.
Worldwatch Paper #137: Small Arms, Big Impact: The Next Challenge of Disarmament
Arms that can be carried by an individual have become so commonplace that they have encouraged habitual recourse to violence, thus threatening the cohesion and wellbeing of many societies. These low-tech, inexpensive, sturdy, and easy-to-use weapons-numbering hundreds of millions-cause as much as 90 percent of the deaths in contemporary conflicts.
Worldwatch Paper #95: Apartheid's Environmental Toll
Worldwatch Paper #86: Environmental Refugees: A Yardstick of Habitability
Food, Water, and Agriculture
Worldwatch Paper #163: Home Grown: The Case For Local Food In A Global Market
Everyone, everywhere depends increasingly on long-distance food. Encouraged by food processing innovations, cheap oil, and subsidies, since 1961 the value of global trade in food has tripled and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold, while population has only doubled. In the United States, food typically travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate, as much as 25 percent farther than in 1980.
Worldwatch Paper #154: Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution
A Global Sampler of Groundwater Pollution
India's Central Pollution Control Board surveyed 22 major industrial zones in the late-1990s and found that groundwater in every one of them was unfit for drinking.
In the northern Chinese provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Shandong, nitrate concentrations in groundwater exceeded the health guideline in more than half of the locations studied in 1995.
Worldwatch Paper #150: Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition
For the first time in human history, the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people, according to a forthcoming report from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization. While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.
Worldwatch Paper #145: Safeguarding the Health of Oceans
For much of human history, humanity has treated oceans as inexhaustible both in terms of what they could produce and in terms of what they could absorb. But humanity has pushed the world's oceans close to--and in some cases past--their natural limits. In this thorough review of the challenges facing us in managing oceans, author Anne Platt McGinn examines the threats to our oceans and prescribes the steps we must take quickly to protect ocean health.
Worldwatch Paper #116: Abandoned Seas: Reversing the Decline of the Oceans
Public concern over the oceans typically focuses on oil spills and the fouling of beaches, but far greater threats are posed by coastal habitat destruction, overfishing, and pollution from industry, farms and households that daily drains into the sea, concludes the author in Abandoned Seas: Reversing the Decline of Oceans. These assaults imperil not only fish--an important source of protein for much of the world--but the diversity of marine life and even the global climate.
Renewable Energy and Transport
Worldwatch Paper #157: Hydrogen Futures: Toward a Sustainable Energy System
Fueled by concerns about urban air pollution, energy security, and climate change, the notion of a "hydrogen economy" is moving beyond the realm of scientists and engineers and into the lexicon of political and business leaders. Interest in hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, is also rising due to technical advances in fuel cells - the potential successors to batteries in portable electronics, power plants, and the internal combustion engine.
Worldwatch Paper #151: Micropower: The Next Electrical Era
Electricity is returning to its origins: generating power on a relatively small scale, close to where it is actually used. Technological, economic, and environmental trends are turning a family of "micropower" devices into increasingly viable choices for meeting electrical needs. Use of these generators can avoid expensive investments in large central power stations and transmission and distribution systems, provide greater reliability, and leave a lighter ecological footprint.
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Pollution
Worldwatch Paper #154: Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution
A Global Sampler of Groundwater Pollution
India's Central Pollution Control Board surveyed 22 major industrial zones in the late-1990s and found that groundwater in every one of them was unfit for drinking. (p. 32)
In the northern Chinese provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Shandong, nitrate concentrations in groundwater exceeded the health guideline in more than half of the locations studied in 1995. (p. 19)
Worldwatch Paper #153: Why Poison Ourselves? A Precautionary Approach to Synthetic Chemicals
There are today between 50,000 and 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commercial production, and new synthetics are entering the market at an average rate of three per day. Most synthetics probably pose little risk for the environment or human health, but some are poisonous even in minute quantities. Recent research on certain highly toxic synthetics has linked them to serious human health effects in the parts per trillion range. Ecological research is uncovering extensive wildlife damage as well.
Worldwatch Paper #145: Safeguarding the Health of Oceans
For much of human history, humanity has treated oceans as inexhaustible both in terms of what they could produce and in terms of what they could absorb. But humanity has pushed the world's oceans close to--and in some cases past--their natural limits. In this thorough review of the challenges facing us in managing oceans, author Anne Platt McGinn examines the threats to our oceans and prescribes the steps we must take quickly to protect ocean health.
Worldwatch Paper #141: Losing Strands in the Web of Life: Vertebrate Declines and the Conservation of Biological Diversity
One of the clearest ways to judge how we are affecting the Earth's biological life-support systems is to examine the status of those organisms closest to ourselves-the 50,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Currently, about one in every four of these vertebrate animals is in serious trouble-either declining strongly, or restricted to small populations, or already threatened with extinction.
Worldwatch Paper #135: Recycling Organic Waste: From Urban Pollutant to Farm Resource
Metal, paper, and plastic are commonly recycled, but most of the world continues to throw away an abundant, reusable resource: organic matter. Today, we normally send organic garbage and sewage to landfills and incinerators, or dump them into rivers, bays, and oceans. And manure is increasingly dumped or overapplied to farmland because of large, centralized livestock production.
Worldwatch Paper #116: Abandoned Seas: Reversing the Decline of the Oceans
Public concern over the oceans typically focuses on oil spills and the fouling of beaches, but far greater threats are posed by coastal habitat destruction, overfishing, and pollution from industry, farms and households that daily drains into the sea, concludes the author in Abandoned Seas: Reversing the Decline of Oceans. These assaults imperil not only fish--an important source of protein for much of the world--but the diversity of marine life and even the global climate.
Society and Economics
Worldwatch Paper #164: Invoking the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in the Quest for a Sustainable World
A powerful pro-environmental coalition may be emerging worldwide as religious people and institutions begin to partner with advocates of sustainable development. The past decade saw a small but growing number of meetings, advocacy initiatives, educational programs, and lobbying efforts by the two communities, who long had kept each other at arm's length.
Worldwatch Paper #152: Working for the Environment: A Growing Source of Jobs
As societies confront environmental challenges, they will need to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, metals, and lumber; restructure the utility and transportation sectors; and boost the efficient use of energy and materials. Many fear that moving toward sustainability will disrupt the economy and trigger massive job loss.
Worldwatch Paper #149: Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape
Global consumption of wood fiber for papermaking can be cut by more than 50 percent, reports a new study by the Worldwatch Institute. This reduction can be achieved through a combination of trimming paper consumption in industrial countries, improving papermaking efficiency, and expanding the use of recycled and nonwood materials, according to Janet Abramovitz and Ashley Mattoon, co-authors of Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape.
Worldwatch Paper #139: Investing in the Future: Harnessing Private Capital Flows for Environmentally Sustainable Development
Private investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the developing world since 1990, overtaking public aid agencies as the principal source of development finance. This unprecedented flow of private funds increasingly has the power to make or break efforts to build an environmentally sustainable global economy.
