Environmental damage raises global disease risk, warns study

GROWING populations and expanding economic activity have strained the planet’s ecosystems over the past half century, destroying 60% of the world’s grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes.

The trend is threatening international efforts to combat poverty and disease, a UN-sponsored study of the Earth’s health warned yesterday. The four-year, €19m million study found that humans had depleted 60% of the world’s grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes.

Unless nations adopt more eco-friendly policies, increased human demands for food, clean water and fuels could speed the disappearance of forests, fish and fresh water reserves and lead to more frequent disease outbreaks over the next 50 years, it warned.

“This report is essentially an audit of nature’s economy and the audit shows that we have driven most of the accounts into the red, if you drive the economy into the red, ultimately there are significant consequences for our capacity to achieve our dreams in terms of poverty reduction and prosperity,” Jonathan Lash, a member of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment board, said.

Walter Reid, director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, said over the past 50 years humans had changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than any comparable period.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “tells us how we can change course”, and urged nations to consider its recommendations.

The study was compiled by 1,360 scientists from 95 nations. Their findings, announced in several cities worldwide, highlight the planet’s problems as the population tops six billion.

A fifth of coral reefs and a third of the mangrove forests have been destroyed in recent decades. The diversity of animal and plant species has fallen sharply, and a third of all species are at risk of extinction. Disease outbreaks, floods and fires have become more frequent. Levels of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas - in the atmosphere have surged, mostly in the past four decades.

Conservation groups called on governments, businesses and individuals to heed the study’s warnings.

“Ecosystems are capital assets. We don’t include them on our balance sheets, but if we did the services they supply would dwarf everything else in value,” said Taylor Ricketts, director of conservation science at the World Wildlife Fund.

The report said degradation of ecosystems was a barrier to achieving development goals adopted at the UN Millennium Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2000: halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015 and improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.