U.N. Issues Grim Pre-Summit Report on Environment

Two weeks before a global environmental summit, the United Nations painted a dismal picture Tuesday of the world’s ecological condition, with fresh water and forests becoming scarcer and air pollution and global sea levels rising.

Organizers of the event, which will draw more than 100 heads of state--but not, as of now, President Bush--to Johannesburg, South Africa, hope these grim facts will help inspire action by summit participants.

The goal of this summit is to create partnerships among the participants and tangible solutions to promote sustainable development worldwide.

“There is a real sense of urgency,” Nitin Desai, the secretary-general of the summit, said Tuesday as he released the report.

Some of the information in the report substantiates well-known trends, but some is surprising. Desai said organizers were shocked to learn that 3 million people--from Mexico to Tanzania to India--die annually because of air pollution.

“If you had a disease killing 3 million people a year, you would treat it as an emergency that needed an urgent response,” Desai said.

Most of the victims are women and children who contract acute respiratory infections because of indoor air pollution that comes from burning wood or animal manure, the study found. Yet most control efforts are aimed at outdoor pollution.

Participants in the summit, including the United States, which may be represented by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, are hoping to craft strategies for attacking this problem and others highlighted by the report.

More than 1 billion people--one-sixth of the world’s population--still lack access to safe water, the report says. Most of them live in Asia and Africa.

The forested areas of the world shrank by 2.4% in the 1990s. Africa took the hardest hit, losing 7% of its forests. Deforestation slowed in Asia, from more than 8% during the 1980s to less than 1% during the 1990s. There was a slight increase of forested areas in developed countries, as a result of regulatory pressure and social activism.

On the positive side, poverty and hunger declined in developing countries during the last decade. The number of chronically undernourished people decreased by 40 million to 800 million over that period.

Most of the bleak statistics in the report focus on the challenges to sustainable development in the developing world. But in the developed world, growing energy consumption presents its own challenges, the report says. While Eastern Europe’s use of energy dropped and Western Europe’s stayed steady over the last decade, North America’s consumption grew.

North America’s emissions of carbon dioxide also increased during the period, while Japan’s held steady and Europe’s decreased.

Americans are expected to continue to produce more than their share of carbon dioxide, which scientists believe contributes to global warming. Bush has pulled the U.S. out of the international accord on global warming, and his plans for addressing the problem allow increased emissions.

Most of Bush’s counterparts in the world’s other economic powerhouses, as well as many Third World leaders, plan to attend the Johannesburg summit. Although the White House has yet to announce its delegation, Powell has indicated that he hopes to attend.

The summit’s U.N. sponsors did not criticize Bush’s decision to not attend, but environmental activists and others said the White House was missing an important opportunity to show that it cares about boosting living standards around the world--and potentially improve its image.

The U.S. government is actively involved in efforts ranging from providing safe water to growing crops with greater yields, said James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Its partners in the effort include other industrialized countries, developing nations, private companies and nongovernmental groups.

“You’re going to see all of those groups coming together to leverage both resources and technical know-how to advance each of these goals,” Connaughton said.

He stressed that Bush was firmly committed to a results-oriented approach to attacking the world’s worst environmental and health problems. The president helped launch this approach in March at a meeting of world leaders in Monterrey, Mexico, pledging to increase foreign aid by 50% to $15 billion annually by 2006.