Emergency is an unstable and ultimately unsustainable condition in a system that calls for effective action to avert breakdown. A global emergency means that the human and natural systems of the planet have become unstable and unsustainable, and that globally coordinate action is required if the global system is not to crash. Global emergency involves both human societies and their planetary environments. In the latter, balances and cycles have been perturbed and are now unstable. Unless re-stabilized, the biosphere will evolve toward different balances and cycles, and the new conditions may be less favorable for supporting human life than those at present. Re-establishing dynamic stability in the biosphere is in the most fundamental and immediate interest of human life and persistence.
Ecological unsustainability. To survive, human beings need an adequate supply of clean water and nourishing food, as well as breathable, adequately clean air. Water, food and air are natural resources, produced by the ecological systems of the planet. We have a global emergency today partly because these resources are overexploited, and their supply is diminishing. The production of oil, fish, lumber, and water has already peaked. Forty percent of the world’s coral reefs are gone, and about 23 million acres of forest are lost each year.
The situation is especially critical in regard to the availability of water. In 1950 there was a potential global reserve of nearly 17,000 m3 of freshwater for every person then living. Since then the rate of water withdrawal has been more than double the rate of population growth, in 1999 the per capita world water reserves decreased to 7,300 m3. Today about one-third of the world’s population doesn’t have access to adequate supplies of clean water, and by 2025 two-thirds of the population will live under conditions of critical water scarcity. By then globally there may only be 4,800 m3 of water reserves per person.
The situation is also critical regarding the availability of productive land. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that there are 7,490 million acres of high quality cropland available on the planet, seventy-one percent of it in the developing world. This quantity is decreasing: worldwide 12 to 17 million acres are lost per year due to soil erosion, destructuring, compaction, impoverishment, excessive desiccation, accumulation of toxic salts, leaching of nutritious elements, and inorganic and organic pollution through urban and industrial wastes. At this rate 741 million acres will be lost by mid-century, leaving 6.67 billion acres to support 8 to 9 billion people. Even if optimally managed and distributed, the remaining 0.74 acres of productive land could only produce subsistence level of food for the entire human population.
Changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere constitute another critical trend. Since the middle of the nineteenth century oxygen has decreased mainly due to the burning of coal; it now dips to nineteen percent of total volume over impacted areas and twelve to seventeen percent over major cities. At six or seven percent of oxygen per total volume, human life can no longer be sustained.
At the same time the atmosphere’s share of greenhouse gases is growing. Two hundred years of burning fossil fuels and cutting down large tracts of forest has increased its carbon dioxide content from about 280 ppm (parts per million) to over 350 ppm. During the 20th century industrial activity and human consumption had injected a full terraton of this gas into the atmosphere, and presently another terraton is being injected in less than twenty years.
The rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide makes it impossible for the planet’s ecosystems to maintain their cycles and balances. In the oceans, the explosive growth of CO2 at the surface makes the water too acid for the survival of shell-forming organisms, the basis of the chain of life in the sea. On land, CO2 absorption is reduced by the destruction of the ecosystems that had previously sustained a stable climate: as much as 40 percent of the world’s forest cover has disappeared due to acid rain, urban sprawl, and the injection of toxins into the soil.
Global warming is an indisputable fact: in recent years the average global temperature has risen significantly, and the warming trend is accelerating. Open to question is only whether warming is due to human activity or to natural causes, or possibly to both. While there were other warming and cooling periods in the history of the Earth—”hot-houses” and “ice-houses”—the current warming trend is likely to have an anthropogenic component. The CO2, methane, and other hot-house gases emitted by human activity create a shield in the upper atmosphere that heats up the air as it prevents heat generated at the surface from escaping into space.
But regardless of whether global warming is produced by human activity, by cycles in the Sun, or by both, it creates unsustainable conditions: drought and harvest failure, water shortages, the spread of diseases, and the die-out of vast tracts of forest. It melts polar ice, and as great masses of ice slide from the Antarctic continental shelf into the sea, it raises sea-levels worldwide. Flooding threatens the lands and habitations of nearly a fifth of the human population.
A continuation of present trends would reduce the chances of survival of large segments of the world community. The nearly seven billion humans now on Earth live close to the resource-limits of the planet, and any further reduction in available resources would deprive the poorest and most affected segments from the minimum level required to ensure physical subsistence. Given the interdependence of contemporary societies, and their dependence on the availability of the basic resources of life, the plight of any significant segment of the population will affect, and hence is of serious concern to, the whole of the world community.
