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Fueled by technological innovations and globalization, in the last two decades the world’s economic growth has lifted more than 660 million people out of poverty and has raised the income level of millions more. However, such growth has too often come at the expense of the environment. As the world population has tripled and the global economy expanded tenfold over the past 60 years, our demands on planet earth have become excessive.
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Jakarta Management Fraud Watch Solutions on Sustainable development in an increasingly warming world
Fueled by technological innovations and globalization, in the last two decades the world’s economic growth has lifted more than 660 million people out of poverty and has raised the income level of millions more. However, such growth has too often come at the expense of the environment. As the world population has tripled and the global economy expanded tenfold over the past 60 years, our demands on planet earth have become excessive. We have been cutting forest trees faster than they can regenerate, over-grazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, over-pumping aquifers, and draining rivers dry. On our agricultural lands, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation, gradually depriving the soil of its inherent fertility. We have been catching fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce, bringing about over-fishing in most parts of the world’s seas and oceans. We have been discharging pollutants into the environment at a greater level than its assimilative capacity, resulting in widespread water pollution.
We have also been emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb them, creating a greenhouse effect and global warming. As a corollary of this carbon-fixing deficit, atmospheric CO2 concentration climbed from 316 ppm (parts per million) in 1959, when official measurement began, to 383 ppm in 2007. Conversion of forests, mangroves, coral reefs and other natural ecosystems into man-made ecosystems (e.g. settlements, agricultural land, industrial estates and infrastructure) combined with global climate change have destroyed plant and animal species far faster than new species can evolve, launching the first mass extinction since the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Global warming and its concomitant impacts including rising sea levels, extreme weather, prolonged drought and flooding, heat waves and outbreaks of diseases will reduce our earth’s sustainable capacity to produce food, energy and other natural resources as well as to assimilate various wastes.
For example, a joint report by the FAO and OECD published recently reveals that the growth of global agricultural production is projected to slow in the coming decade, from 2.1 percent a year in the last decade to 1.5 percent annually from 2013 to 2022. In summary, throughout history, humans have lived on the earth’s sustainable yield — the interest from its natural endowment. But since the early 1990s we have been consuming the endowment itself. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal along with interest in the short run, but in the long run it leads to bankruptcy. Actually humanity’s collective demand first exceeded the earth’s sustainable capacity in 1980, and in 1999 surpassed that capacity by 20 percent (US National Academy of Sciences, 2002). Continue: crown capital management group