Earth’s water systems can’t keep up with usage

East Lansing, Michigan, Oct. 22— Fresh water systems around the world are so environmentally degraded they are losing their ability to support human, animal, and plant life, according to a report released Saturday.

Their decline will mean increased water shortages for people and rapid population loss or extinction for many other species, the World Resources Institute predicted.

“The findings are very disturbing,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the policy research center, based in Washington, DC. “We’re just using way more water than the earth can afford to give us.”

The report is part of a comprehensive study by the institute on how human activity is changing the world’s ecosystems. It was released during the national meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists at Michigan State University. The report makes no recommendations but serves as a warning to citizens, industries and government, Lash said. He described it as a “physical exam” that produced a poor diagnosis. Over the next six months, specialized reports will come on agroecosystems, coastal areas, forests and grasslands.

While many regions have ample water supplies, four out of every 10 people live in river basins with water scarcity, the report says. It predicts that by 2025, at least 3.5 billion people — roughly half the world’s population — will experience water shortages.

“Only about 1 percent of the water on the planet is fresh water available for human use,” Lash said. The report says that agriculture accounts for 93 percent of fresh water use, producing runoff that degrades water quality with silt and chemicals.

Dams, diversions or canals fragment 60 percent of the world’s largest rivers, trapping runoff and sediments. While dam construction has slowed in the United States, the report says many more are being built in basins of the Yangtze River in China, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, and the Danube River in Eastern Europe.

Also being depleted is the world’s groundwater, the sole source of drinking water for 1.5 billion people. Half the world’s wetlands were lost in the 20th century as land was converted to agricultural and urban use or contaminated with diseases such as malaria, the report said.

Invasive species pose another problem, competing with native species for food and habitat. Twenty percent of the world’s 10,000 fresh water fish species have become extinct, threatened or endangered in recent decades.

The findings are bad news for the environment and the economy, said Carmen Revenga, who helped write the institute’s report. “We need to value fresh water ecosystems not only for the goods they produce, like fish and clams, but also the services they give, like the filters and nurseries that wetlands provide,” Revenga said.

Source: Associated Press

Over-consumption threatens human survival

By Patricia Reaney

London, England, Oct. 23— Current rates of consumption are depleting the Earth of its natural resources and threatening the survival of humans, the environmental group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned on Friday.

Natural ecosystems have declined 33 percent because of over consumption in the last 30 years, and if current trends continue humans will need two more planets to continue to exist, the group said in its Living Planet Report 2000.

“Our current rate of consumption is eroding the very fabric of our planet and will ultimately threaten our long-term survival as a species,” said Francis Sullivan, the director of conservation at WWF-UK.

“The world is beyond its caring capacity. We can no longer sustain the number of people consuming the way we are,” he added in a telephone interview.

The Swiss-based group produced a so-called ecological footprint, which measures a population’s consumption of food, materials, and energy in terms of the area of biologically productive land or sea required to produce the resources.

Not surprisingly, the ecological footprint of rich countries is four times bigger than those of poor nations.

“It is the consumers of the rich nations of the temperate northern regions of the world who are primarily responsible for the ongoing loss of natural wealth in the tropics,” Jonathan Loh, the editor of the report, said in a statement.

The United Arab Emirates, Singapore and the United States have the biggest ecological footprints, followed by Kuwait, Denmark, New Zealand, and Ireland.

Namibia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Eritrea have the smallest.

CO2 emissions are the main problem

The WWF also produced an ecological footprint for carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. Many of the same countries are at the same ends of the chart with their carbon monoxide footprints.

The average North American footprint is almost twice the area required by the average Western European, and five times greater than that of Asian, African and Latin American countries.

“CO2 emissions is the number one issue,” Sullivan said, adding that he hopes the report will put pressure on nations at the top end of the scale to rethink their policies and increase their use of energy-saving technologies.

He also emphasized the importance of the Climate Change Summit in the Hague from November 13-24 when governments will finalize the details of a global plan to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

Sullivan described the Hague meeting and the Rio+10 summit that will take place in 2002 as the last chance for politicians to save our planet.

Source: Reuters

Critics blast spate of oil mergers

By Danielle Knight

Washington, DC, Oct. 18 (IPS)— In light of a proposed merger of two multinational oil companies announced this week, consumer and environmental groups are warning that the growing concentration of power and wealth of the oil industry is unsafe for the environment, communities, and consumers worldwide.

On Oct. 15, California-based Chevron Corporation agreed to acquire Texaco Inc. for about 36 billion dollars in stock, creating the world’s fourth-largest oil company. The acquisition comes at a time when crude oil prices have hit their highest in a decade, while oil company profits have skyrocketed.

Both companies are expected to be forced to sell off some of their assets in order to win approval by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Regardless of the long road before the acquisition is approved, the merger will likely go ahead relatively smoothly since the green-light has already been given recently to several even larger oil mergers.

In April, British Petroleum (BP) Amoco and ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Company) received clearance from the US FTC for the combination of their companies. The union will create a corporate group worth some 200 billion dollars.

And in late 1999, the regulatory agency approved the 82 billion dollar merger of Exxon Corporation and Mobil Corporation.

Consumer and environmental groups alike are concerned that the recent spate of mergers will lead to an unhealthy concentration of power. They say the mergers are unmaking history by putting back some of the pieces of the Standard Oil empire that was broken up into 34 companies by the US Supreme Court i n 1911.

Exxon was originally Standard Oil of New Jersey, while Mobil was once Standard Oil of New York. Atlantic Refining was one of the Standard Oil companies and in 1965 was later named ARCO. Standard Oil of California was renamed Chevron, while Standard Oil of Indiana was renamed Amoco. Standard Oil of Ohio was bought out in 1987 by British Petroleum.

Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project says that this trend toward more consolidation is bad for consumers in the long run and has the added impact of increasing the political power of these larger companies to influence environmental and energy policy.

Most of these recently merged oil companies have been involved in campaigns against an international agreement on climate change, known as the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty requires industrialized countries to reduce their heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the burning of coal, oil, and petrol.

The influence of the oil companies on US lawmakers, through campaign contributions and lobbying, has already thwarted ratification of the Protocol. As they merge, their views become even more commanding.

Rather than moving away from the use of oil, these larger, more politically powerful companies, says Hauter, “can influence public policy and this results in more subsidies, more tax breaks for the oil industry and increased pressure to drill in environmentally sensitive areas.’’

James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, an advocacy group based in Washington, says that worldwide consolidation of the oil industry makes it easier for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to keep prices high.

“OPEC benefits from increased oil company concentration, which makes it much easier to monitor private actions and even to solicit cooperation from the leading private actors,’’ he told reporters.

Environmentalists say that the Chevron-Texaco merger unites two “corporate criminals’’ which have troubled records on the environment and human rights. Both companies are currently being sued in US court for their operations abroad which allegedly have led to environmental and human rights violations.

“These facts are rarely considered by the regulators when looking at mergers and acquisitions, but they should be,’’ says Danny Kennedy, executive director of Project Underground, a California-based environmental watchdog.

Chevron is facing a lawsuit in Federal Court for its alleged role in providing the Nigerian military with equipment that was used to attack people protesting the oil companies in 1998. The company is also accused of aiding the military in an attack on the villages of Opia and Ikeny an in the Niger Delta region.

New York-based Texaco is facing a billion-dollar class action lawsuit filed by people in Ecuador, including several indigenous tribes, charging the company deliberately polluted the environment.

According to Judith Kimerling, a lawyer who first documented the impact of oil development on the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1991 book ‘Amazon Crude’, Texaco discharged an estimated 4.3 million gallons of highly toxic “produced’’ water per day into the rain forest, as it pumped billions of gallons of crude out of Ecuador.

The plaintiffs claim that the company - which denies all charges - ignored oil industry standards and instead of re-injecting the waste into the ground, Texaco dumped its toxic cocktail of chemicals into unlined pits that eventually leached into streams and rivers.

Paulina Garzon with the Center for Economic and Social Rights in Quito, Ecuador has worked with indigenous communities in documenting the impact of pollution allegedly caused by Texaco’s past operations.

“Now, we find that the first thing (oil) companies say when they come to Ecuador is that they are not like Texaco,’’ says Garzon.

EPA investigating siting of industry in black neighborhood

Freetown, Massachusetts, Oct. 22— The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is investigating whether zoning rules here have targeted a low income, historically black neighborhood for industrial development.

A group of neighbors in the Braley Road section of town, are claiming the town’s decision to zone the area for industrial development - in a town where 80 percent of land is undeveloped and most residents are white - amounts to environmental racism.

James Younger, director of EPA’s Office of Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said the agency has just begun the investigation, and is interviewing residents and reviewing town records.

TJX Companies Inc. has proposed an 800,000 square foot warehouse in the neighborhood. The company plans to employ 900 people from the Freetown and New Bedford region if the warehouse is built.

Selectman Lawrence Ashley said allegations of environmental racism are unfounded.

“To say we are targeting any area is unfounded and purely ridiculous,” he said. “Basically, you have a few residents who don’t want to see 900 jobs come to town.”

But fellow selectman Mark Howland said town officials have not heeded the neighborhood’s concerns. “In my opinion, the people of Braley Road are being targeted by the town,” he said.

The neighborhood, which traces its roots back 100 years to Cape Verdean immigrants, has already prevented an asphalt plant from moving in.

Residents say truck traffic on the street has increased, and Dave Branco, a neighborhood organizer, no longer lets his two sons play near the road. He said noise and traffic have increased, and that a proposed warehouse will only add to the problem.

“This appears to be the classic Massachusetts case of environmental justice,” Gregor McGregor, a lawyer for the residents, told The Boston Globe. “You just don’t plunk industry down where there are powerless people.”

Source: Associated Press