Environmental Challenges Linked to Global Economics

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BYLINE: MELANIE GOSLING

IT may seem downright perverse to say I was heartened by the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Living Planet report released last week.

Who could be encouraged by a document which shows that humanity is still firmly on its course of wrecking the planet, only doing so a little faster and more ruthlessly than before?

Climate-changing carbon emissions have increased, species are declining, fish stocks have collapsed, the world's forests are being hacked down faster than they can re-grow.

We are polluting, consuming and destroying at a such rate that many ecosystems can no longer function properly. Our human footprint has become too big for nature to cope with; we are in "ecological overshoot".

If we continue on this reckless path, the report says, we would need a second planet Earth by 2050 to provide us with the resources we gobble up so fast.

Nothing but grim news in all that, certainly. But what struck me as encouraging was a comment in the foreword written by WWF International's director-general in Geneva, James Leape. After pointing out that, if we did not balance …