3067. More Than 77 Percent of Earth's Land Has Been Modified By Human Industry

By Livia Albeck-Ripka, The New York Times, October 31, 2018

         Sunset on the Tapajós River, deep in the Amazon rain forest. 

         Credit: Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

MELBOURNE, Australia — Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world’s wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet’s few remaining wild places could disappear in decades.

Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world’s remaining wildernesses — and the image is bleak.

“We’re on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic,” said James R. Allan, one of the study’s authors.

In the study, Mr. Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for next month in Egypt, to protect all of the world’s remaining wilderness areas.

“We cannot afford to lose more,” he said. “We must save it in its entirety.”

The parts of the world most in need of protecting are in some of the largest and most powerful nations, the study found. More than 70 percent of wilderness areas can be found in Russia, Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil.

Wilderness, the study’s authors said, is defined as an area not subject to direct human use.

These areas are the only places on earth that have natural levels of biodiversity, and can continue to sustain plant and animal species on an evolutionary time scale.

Moreover, these spots often act as the world’s lungs, storing carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

“Wild areas provide a lot of life support systems for the planet. We’d lose those benefits and those ecosystems services, and the cost of having to replace that would be immense,” Mr. Allan said.

In 2016, the scientists mapped the world’s terrestrial wildernesses. This year, they did the same for the world’s oceans.

More of the oceans have been affected by human industry — including oil exploration, shipping and commercial fishing — than have the world’s land mass, the study found.

According to the study, “87 percent of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities.”

“This astonishing expansion of the aggressive human footprint is happening everywhere,” said William Laurance, a professor of environmental science at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Laurance said that while he “wholeheartedly” agreed with the researchers’ message to policy experts, even more aggressive action was needed to stop global resource extraction and industrial expansion.

He warned that developing countries like Brazil and China are eager to catch up with more industrialized nations. Each step those countries take has a compounding effect on the environment: Developing mines also means building roads and refineries.

Healthy ecosystems are crucial in their own right for biodiversity and mitigating climate change, but more importantly, said the researchers, they are home for hundreds of millions of indigenous people, who rely on the wilderness to survive and thrive.

1486. Global Industrial Production Shakes Off 2007 Doldrums

By Floyd Norris, The New York Times, July 18, 2014

INDUSTRIAL production around the world plunged after the Great Recession began, and in most advanced economies has yet to fully recover. But that is not the case in many emerging economies, with production hitting new highs.

The United States this week reported that industrial production, excluding construction, rose 0.2 percent in June and was up 4.3 percent from a year earlier. That is a faster rate than any other major advanced economy has shown recently, but it pales next to the rates of growth in such countries as China and India.

The accompanying charts show the change in levels of industrial production since the end of 2007, as the recession was beginning in the United States. The latest report indicates that production in the United States was 3 percent higher in June than it was in December 2007. That is, however, largely because of increased oil and gas production. Overall manufacturing output is still a bit below the pre-recession levels, although production in the motor vehicle industry has been strong.

Asia Leads the Way in Industrial Production

Industrial production in the United States has recovered from the Great Recession, but most other advanced countries continue to struggle. Emerging economies, led by those in Asia, have raised production much more rapidly. The charts show changes from production in December 2007, the month the recession began in the United States, with the world average shown for comparison.

The Netherlands government compiles industrial production reports from 27 advanced economies and 54 developing economies around the world, and computes international averages. Its latest report shows that world production in April was almost 12 percent higher than it had been at the end of 2007, but that production in the advanced economies was nearly 5 percent lower than it had been.

In the emerging economies, production was up by more than a third from the 2007 level, primarily because of the performance of Asian countries, where production is up by more than 60 percent.

China releases data only on annual changes, making any calculation of month-to-month changes hard to estimate, but it appears that its production has approximately doubled from the 2007 level. In India, production is up nearly a quarter since the recession began.

The Asian boom has not helped Japan, the largest advanced economy in the region. The latest production figure is nearly 14 percent lower than the 2007 number.

Until 2011, industrial production in Germany — the third largest exporter in the world, behind China and the United States — recovered more rapidly than did production in the United States. But since then, it has stabilized. In May, production remained nearly 3 percent below the 2007 level.

That is, however, much better than in any of the other major eurozone countries. Over all, production in the eurozone is 11 percent lower than in 2007. Among the three largest countries in the zone other than Germany, France has done the best, with production still down 15 percent. In Italy, production is off 22 percent and in Spain it is down 28 percent.

An exception to the eurozone doldrums seems to be Ireland, where production is now a little higher than it was in 2007. In May, the production figure was up more than 20 percent from the year before, a far better performance than in any of the major euro economies.

In Britain, which is outside the eurozone, production also seems to have stagnated. In May, the level was 12 percent below the 2007 figure.