Worldwatch Reports and Papers
Fisheries and the economic and social benefits they offer society are under siege around the globe. Most of the world's marine fish stocks and primary fishing grounds are in decline. Nearly one third of all fish are thrown back to sea dead or dying each y ear because of wasteful fishing practices. The food security of more than 1 billion people who rely on fish for much of their animal protein is also at risk because one of every three fish captured goes to feed animals and other uses.
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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.
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The accelerating destruction of the world's forests threatens the planet's ecological and economic health. Already almost half of the forests that once covered the planet are gone. Between 1980 and 1995 alone, at least 2 million square kilometers of forests were destroyed-an area larger than Mexico.
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.
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The climate change debate is undergoing a seismic shift--beyond a paralyzing preoccupation with the cost of addressing the problem, and toward an active awareness that bold steps to stabilize the climate could create some of the largest economic opportunities of the twenty-first century.
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.
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The trends of environmental deterioration are beginning to threaten the security of food supplies. These trends, combined with a shrinking backlog of agricultural technology, are slowing growth in the world grain harvest. Meanwhile, the demand for grain is expanding at a near record rate as 80 million people are added each year and as incomes climb at record rates in Asia, led by China.
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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.
Progress on major environmental issues, such as global warming, will be nearly impossible until the world's governments begin to tax activities that cause the problems. Today, environmental harm often seems free even though it imposes real costs on this and future generations. Environmental taxes pass these hidden costs back to the people who cause them. And unlike most regulations, which set minimum standards, they create a steady prod for the development of environmentally sound technologies and products.
Around the world, government policies shunt at least $500 billion a year toward activities like logging, mining, overfishing, and driving that hurt the environment and thus undermine the global economy. These subsidies contribute to environmental problems ranging from deforestation to air and water pollution. The money ultimately comes out the pockets of consumer and taxpayers, effectively increasing taxes on work, investment, and consumption that discourage these very activities, thus placing additional drag on economies.
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