Dedicate the ‘90s to the Environment : International Commitment Could Be Our Gift to New Century

Today’s environmental problems are closely interlinked, planetary in scale and deadly serious. They cannot be addressed issue-by-issue or by one nation or even by a small group of nations acting alone. They will not yield to modest commitments of resources in the face of a doubling of world population and a quintupling of world economic activity in the lifetimes of today’s children.

The nations of the world must come together in recognition of that grave challenge. They should declare that a priority mission of international cooperation and diplomacy in the 1990s will be to deliver a gift to the new century of a planet sustained and whole. To give long-term structure to this commitment they should establish a 10-year program, the International Environmental Decade.

This program could be inaugurated with the high-level international conference on the environment promised by President Bush during the campaign--a pledge that he has since reiterated. Born in politics, this conference in fact presents an opportunity to do something of genuine historical importance.

The timing could not be more propitious. The world’s environment is in trouble. The buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere threatens far-reaching climate change, and one class of these gases--chlorofluorocarbons--is also depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, which shields us from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Over large areas of the globe, air pollutants are escaping urban-industrial areas and invading the countryside, seriously damaging aquatic life, forests and crops.

In the developing world, pressures on natural resources intensify daily. The deserts expand while the forests, with their immense wealth of life forms, retreat. An acre of tropical forests disappears every second. Hundreds of millions of people live in absolute poverty, destroying the resources on which their future depends because no alternative is open to them.

Although the seriousness of these challenges is increasingly acknowledged by political leaders as diverse as Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev and Rajiv Gandhi, only modest efforts have been launched to deal with them. As yet there is no concerted international response on a scale equal to the challenges. The international conference on the environment would be a major step in closing the gap between the increasing realization that grave problems exist and the paucity of the political response to date.

An International Environmental Decade could both stimulate and coordinate action on three fronts. The first of these is providing the poor of the world with environmentally non-destructive livelihoods; sustainable development is critical both to meet basic human needs and to take pressure off a deteriorating resource base. The second front is transforming industrial systems away from the pollution-prone technologies of the 20th Century to the environmentally benign technologies that will be essential if economic growth is to continue. And the third is stabilizing populations both in nations where growth is explosive and on a global basis before the world’s population doubles again.

Most basically, world political leaders must devise a new system of international responsibility--burden-sharing to sustain the Earth and its people--that does not exist today. Unless such a system is worked out, the next great international crisis is likely to be about the environment.

Nowhere is such a system needed more than in slowing down the global warming brought on by the greenhouse effect. To be successful, we will need a series of international conventions that not only respond to the complexity of that issue but also provide complementary solutions to other environmental problems.

We need to secure swift international approval of the ozone-layer protection protocol signed in Montreal last year and have the nations of the world come back to negotiate a complete, swift phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons. We need an overall global climate-protection convention--a prime goal of which should be to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions through greatly improved energy efficiency and other measures.

We need an international agreement to protect the world’s tropical forests and to reforest the spreading wasteland areas in many developing countries. Relief for Third World countries from the stifling burden of international debt will be required for progress on this front.

Bush’s sponsorship of an environmental conference of world leaders can put the world on the road to this new system of international responsibility. The 1990s are all the time that we have left to prepare what can be our most important gift to the new century.