"Top-ranked annual book on sustainable development."
Worldwatch's flagship annual remains the most authoritative "go-to" resource for those who understand the importance of nurturing a safe, sane, and healthy global environment through both policy and action.
“...one of the most critical resources for understanding the problems facing our planet and their possibl
“The environmental movement as we know it today could not exist without the extraordinary
researchers at Worldwatch”
Bill McKibben, best-selling author of The End of Nature
A Bangladeshi child eats a bowl of rice. An American child plays with a plastic
doll. A woman in Finland talks on a cell phone. A man in Zimbabwe fills his car
with gasoline. A Japanese woman reads a newspaper.
"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.
Featuring a Foreword by U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, State of the World 2002 includes chapters on climate change,
farming, toxic chemicals, sustainable tourism, population, resource conflicts
and global governance, with a special focus on the United Nations World
Summit on Sustainable Development, which will be held in Johannesburg,
South Africa in August/September 2002.
In State of the World 2001, the Institute's award-winning research team takes a fresh look at the most difficult challenge the world faces: how to build an environmentally sustainable economy before we do permanent damage to the natural systems that support our global civilization.
As the 21st century dawns, the Worldwatch Institute's award-winning research team takes a fresh look at the trends that have put the global economy on a collision course with the Earth's ecosystems. This first edition of the new century lays out the case for a rapid transition to an environmentally sustainable economy before we do permanent damage to the natural systems that support our global civilization.
State of the World 1999 presents evidence of the birth of an entirely new economy, an Environmental Revolution that may be as sweeping as the Industrial Revolution that put us on our present unsustainable course. The authors argue that, far from being too costly to consider, the transition to an environmentally sustainable economy represents the greatest investment opportunity in history. In country after country, community after community, people are making the changes needed to shift from today's fossil fuel-based, auto-centric, throwaway economy to a solar/hydrogen-powered, bicycle/rail-centered, reuse/recycle economy--an economy that will satisfy human needs while preserving the Earth's ecosystems.
In this fifteenth edition of State of the World, Lester R. Brown and the Worldwatch research team look at the environmental effects of continuing economic growth as the economy outgrows the earth's ecosystem. As the global economy has expanded from $5 trillion of output in 1950 to $29 trillion in 1997, its demands have crossed many of the earth's sustainable yield thresholds.
This fourteenth edition of State of the World coincides with two important milestones: the fifth anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and the tenth anniversary of the 1987 Montreal protocol to protect the earth's ozone layer. With these two landmarks in mind, 1997 seemed a particularly good year to review progress in addressing global environmental problems.
In this 1996 edition of State of the World 1996, Lester R. Brown and the other researchers at Worldwatch identify and describe the rapid acceleration of trends that is driving the human experiment across thresholds of change far more rapidly than in the past, challenging our ability to react rationally and quickly.
