Worldwatch Reports and Papers
The first systematic study of global peace and disarmament budgets shows a rapid rise from $2.5 billion in 1989 to nearly $16 billion in 1994, while military budgets dropped 23 percent. Yet peace spending still equals only 2 percent of military spending, according to a new Worldwatch study, "Budgeting for Disarmament: The Costs of War and Peace."
Consumer societies can no longer avoid confronting the inefficiency with which they use materials, according to a new Worldwatch Institute study. An overhaul of the materials economy--redesigning products and processes and reducing waste--would create millions of new jobs, while reducing the production of toxic waste and a range of other environmental problems.
With fisheries policy fiercely debated from the U.S. Congress to the United Nations, "Net Loss: Fish, Jobs & the Marine Environment," examines the ecological, social and economic crisis in world fisheries. Researcher Peter Weber describes a half- century of unsustainable fishing practices, reliance on exploitive technologies, and self-defeating government policies.
New technologies and a more competitive market will severely shake the $800-billion-a-year electric power industry--one of the world's largest--in the next few years, reports the Worldwatch Institute.
A growing world transportation crisis is driving government funding away from building roads and airports and toward a global rail revival. This investment is providing an economic boon to the regions involved.
Two thirds of the planet's original forests have been felled, and despite a decade of well-meaning global initiatives, the chainsaw is working faster than ever. To halt deforestation will require no less than restructuring three features of the modern economy: property rights to forests, pricing of forest products, and political power over the fate of forests, according to a new study by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C.
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.
Faster, cheaper computers, better programs, and rapidly expanding international computer networks are becoming extraordinary tools for environmental protection and sustainable development, according to the author of Global Network: Computers in a Sustainable Society.
The collapse of Bosnia, far from being a unique horror, may presage many other post-Cold War conflicts unless the international community rapidly strengthens its peacekeeping machinery, concludes Critical Juncture: The Future of Peacekeeping, a study from the Worldwatch Institute, a policy research group based in Washington, D.C.
World trade--growing far faster than the global economy itself--is an engine that currently accelerates the environmental degradation caused by unsustainable economic activity. But it also has the power to pull the world onto an environmentally sustainable track--if environmental protection is included in the evolving rules of international trade, according to Costly Tradeoffs: Reconciling Trade and the Environment, a study by the Worldwatch Institute, a policy research organization based in Washington, D.C.
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