|
Resource wars and environmental calamities -- not terrorism -- are the prime national security threat of the new millennium. So says a landmark report from the Worldwatch Institute. Half of all jobs worldwide depend on fisheries, forests, and agriculture, three sectors hardest hit by new global trends. Gale-force globalization has generated rising unemployment - widening gaps between rich and poor - and a severely degraded natural environment. These forces in turn undermine social stability, triggering desperate acts of war.
Reports from the World Resources Institute, and NAFTA's North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation confirm that we've made remarkable environmental advances over the past decade. But key trends continue to worsen:
- Carbon dioxide emissions rose 9% in the last decade. Earth is projected to warm 4 to 10 degrees in the next century - changing weather, flooding coastal cities and altering growing regions worldwide.
- 40% of the world's agricultural lands are seriously degraded, with their productive capacity impaired.
- Cities in the poorest parts of the world are growing by a million people a week, seeking refuge from land no longer farmable. In the next decade, 27 cities in the developing world will grow larger than New York.
- One-third of the world's people face water scarcity. Water use is rising twice as fast as population.
- According to an internal World Bank memo, the $2 billion per year it invests in oil, gas, and mining projects in developing countries represents a "clear and present danger" to local economies and the environment.
For millennia nations have quarreled over resources and refugees have been driven from the land by collapse of natural systems. But in the current climate of political, economic, and environmental instability - when the stakes are higher than ever before - reducing poverty, revitalizing the natural environment, and assuring the basic needs of the world's peoples, say many analysts, are the best means of addressing the terrorist threat.
|
