Worldwatch Paints Gloomy Global Picture

Five years after the Earth Summit, with all its promise for attacking global ills, forests still disappear, the air is murkier than ever, population is up almost half a billion people.

Worldwatch Institute paints another bleak global landscape in its annual “State of the World” report being released today.

Governments lag badly in meeting goals set at the Rio de Janeiro summit, the environmental research group Worldwatch says in its global review distributed in 30 languages.

“Unfortunately, few governments have even begun the policy changes that will be needed to put the world on an environmentally sustainable path,” the independent institute declares.

In what has become an annual litany of earth’s ills, Worldwatch documents problems with food supply, crop-land depletion, chronic disease, loss of species, climate change and political instability.

Among Worldwatch’s gloomiest conclusions: millions of acres of tropical and deciduous forest still disappear each year, carbon dioxide emissions are at record highs, and population growth is outpacing food production.

The report found hope in increasing numbers of grass-roots groups, particularly in Bangladesh and India. Also, more than 1,500 cities in 51 countries have adopted local plans and rules, often more stringent than their national governments proposed at Rio, the report said.

The Worldwatch report is toughest on the United States and the World Bank.

It says American leadership has faded since the summit, in contrast to strides by Europe in fighting pollution and Japan in maintaining foreign aid.

Worldwatch says the World Bank, which lends $20 billion a year to poor countries, touts environmental lending but pours funds into “development schemes that add to carbon emissions and destroy natural ecosystems.”