Population Issues Network Newswatch

Looking at the world through demographics. This blog covers population in the news. Accelerating demographic growth is now the main factor driving biodiversity loss, growing resource scarcity, poverty and social conflict. Over-production and over-consumption are worsening this ecological crisis. 7 billion in 2011 - 9.3 or 10.6 billion (UN high estimate) by 2050. 80 million additional people a year at current rates! Is it not time to rethink population growth?

Monday, July 11, 2011

UN: Only Green Technology Can Avert 'Planetary Catastrophe'

Russia's Khimki Forest was logged to make way for a Moscow-St. Petersburg highway, April 2011 (Photo by Daniel Beilinson)

NEW YORK, New York, July 5, 2011 (ENS) - Humanity is near to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater and faster than the industrial revolution to avoid "a major planetary catastrophe," warns a new United Nations report.

"The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation," published today by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs calls for investments of at least $1.9 trillion per year to avert this catastrophe.

"It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the Earth"s ecosystem," the report says.

"A comprehensive global energy transition is urgently needed in order to avert a major planetary catastrophe," the report warns.

In his preface to the report, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes that "rather than viewing growth and sustainability as competing goals on a collision course, we must see them as complementary and mutually supportive imperatives. This becomes possible when we embrace a low-carbon, resource-efficient, pro-poor economic model."

About half of the forests that once covered the Earth are gone, groundwater resources are being depleted and contaminated, enormous reductions in biodiversity have already taken place," according to the report, and, "through increased burning of fossil fuels, the stability of the planet's climate is being threatened by global warming."

For full article: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2011/2011-07-05-02.html

Click here to read the report, "The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation.

The World Economic and Social Survey comes out annually. Last year's survey called for a major overhaul of the machinery