A major argument for making immediate and significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is that human-induced climate change--on top of other environmental problems--may overwhelm human and natural systems by increasing the prevalence of climate-sensitive diseases, reducing agricultural productivity in developing countries, raising sea levels, and altering ecosystems, forests, and biodiversity worldwide. But even assuming that human-induced climate change might prove to be the proverbial last straw, there are other, more-efficient approaches to saving the camel's back. Instead of lightening or eliminating the last straw--analogous to reducing or halting climate change--we could save the camel's back by reducing its cumulative burden, by strengthening its back so that it can better withstand the total burden, or by sharing its burden with other camels. These alternative concepts can be used to devise policies to address the issue of climate change and would, in effect, lighten the cumulative environmental and public health burden on the globe, reducing vulnerability and increasing adaptability to climate change while, incidentally, also decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. We can, for example, reduce the cumulative ecological or public health burden by reducing existing threats so the Earth can bear a heavier load from any new or increased threats that might be generated by future global warming. Similarly, since climate change could create regional winners and losers, we could spread the burden more evenly through trade. As we shall see, these alternative approaches are in many respects superior to the single-minded pursuit of reductions in climate change. The Present: The Bad News Over the last century or more, the globe has warmed 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius (0.7 to 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international panel established to examine the science and impacts of climate change. This change, perhaps, is due to man's influence. (1) Over this period, some climate-sensitive environmental indicators or sectors of the economy have worsened, but so far anthropogenic warming has had little to do with these declines. Consider, for instance, that while sea level has risen a modest 8 inches in the past century, it's not clear what portion of that rise, if any, is due to global warming. Regardless, its current impacts on coasts and coastal resources are small compared with those arising from other human activities such as development; extraction of oil, gas, and water resources; over-fishing; agricultural runoff; and damming of rivers upstream of estuaries. (2) Meanwhile, forested area declined by 190 million hectares (470 million acres) in developing nations between 1980 and 1995. This decline, which occurred largely because increases in food demand outstripped increases in agricultural yield, is unrelated to global warming. During the same period, forest cover in developed nations expanded by 20 million hectares (50 million acres) mainly because of technology-based, high-yield agriculture. (3) Conversion of forests and other habitat to agricultural uses is the greatest current and future threat to global biodiversity as well as to carbon stores and sinks. (4) The Present: The Good News For other critical climate-sensitive sectors and indicators, matters have actually improved. Global agricultural productivity has never been higher, for instance. An acre of cropland sustains about twice as many people today as it did in 1900. People have never been fed better or more cheaply. Between 1961 and 1998, food supplies per person increased 24 percent, although the population almost doubled; and between 1969-71 and 1995-97, the number of people in developing countries suffering from chronic hunger declined from 35 percent to 19 percent. (5) In the richer countries, deaths due to climate-sensitive infectious and parasitic diseases are now the exception rather than the rule and are declining in most developing countries thanks to better nutrition and public-health measures. …
In formulating a response to I the risk of future human influence on the climate, it is important to understand what has happened in the recent past. Has the climate actually been changing? And if so, how do we know if we are causing it? These two simple questions raise some of the most contentious and complicated topics in the whole climate change debate: the detection and attribution of change. To introduce this complex topic, a look at a more familiar problem may be useful. Suppose you step onto your bathroom scale some morning and look down to find the number is one pound higher than you expected. You then call out, Honey; I'm gaining weight. I've been eating too much! What does it take to reach such a conclusion with any degree of confidence? First, how do you know your weight is actually higher? You may suspect that the accuracy of your bathroom scale is not that great: you paid only $19.95 for it. You have also observed that readings on your health club scale differ from those at home. So there is error in the measurement itself: you can detect your weight increase only with some error. Thus informed, you might say, There is a 90 percent probability that my weight is between 0.8 and 1.2 pounds higher than the last time I looked! Second, does this measurement indicate a change that might have some underlying cause, like eating too much? Here another complexity enters: your body weight may go up and down by amounts comparable to your observed gain this day regardless of what you eat, in response to changes in temperature and humidity or your psychological state--perhaps your boss is on vacation for the month. If the magnitude of this natural variability is similar to the change you are seeing on the bathroom scale, you should be cautious when saying that you have detected something significant. You have a problem of sorting the signal of a significant change in your body, perhaps attributable to food intake, from the noise of its natural fluctuations. So a still more accurate statement might be, There is a 70 percent probability that my weight has gone up between 0.8 and 1.2 pounds for some reason other than natural variability. The third question that arises is, why the apparent change? Weight gain does have a basis in physiology; and this knowledge may be bolstered by past experience and observation of others. But the relationship cannot be stated precisely because it depends on many factors, such as adjustments in metabolism and amount of physical activity, that are poorly understood. This gives rise to a fourth question, how accurately have you recorded or recalled your food intake, physical activity level, and other factors that you know affect your weight? With this uncertainty about the relationship of food intake to weight, the most that can be said with scientific accuracy about attribution may be something like, There is a 90 percent chance that at least one-half of the increase shown on this scale is due to my eating too much. Or, where formal analysis is missing, Honey, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that I'm eating too much. To summarize, detection of weight gain and its attribution to increased food intake involves four elements: * An estimate of the weight change and the potential for error in measuring it, * Knowledge of the natural variability in your body weight, * An understanding of the mechanisms by which body weight responds to food intake and other factors, and a model of the relationships, and * A record of food intake and understanding of its accuracy. Detection and Attribution Now consider the global climate system. We have only imperfect measurements of how climate has changed over past decades, and our understanding of patterns of natural climate variability is limited. Moreover, our models of the interacting chemistry; physics, and biology of the global system are as yet incomplete, and we do not have an accurate inventory of past changes in factors, human and natural, that could have altered the Earth's radiation balance, the so-called radiative forcing. …
The fortunes of farmers, and the people they feed, depend on the vagaries of weather. From drought to floods to early and late frosts, the uncontrollable elements of the climate can make or break even the most carefully controlled farming operation. So, if the climate were to warm by even a few degrees, the effects on agriculture, and the resultant changes in the food supply, could be significant. While we can't change the weather, we can modify our means of agricultural production. In the United States, agriculture has undergone major changes in the past century, changes that have a bearing on the interactions of climate and agriculture. Increased understanding of crop production has allowed us to steadily increase yield. In the last 100 years, as overall yield has increased, yield variability has generally decreased. At the same time, the production of major crops such as corn, wheat, and potatoes has shifted geographically. Beginning in the late 1800s, for example, the mean location of corn production began to shift from southwestern Indiana and southeastern Illinois to the north and west, so that by the 1990s, the mean location was in southeastern Iowa. Mean location of wheat production, meanwhile, shifted west from Illinois to Nebraska. There is evidence that climate has changed over the past 100 years, (1) but these changes are of insufficient magnitude or in the wrong direction to be responsible for most of these changes in yield variability and the location of production. The northward movement of corn production, for example, is most likely associated with changes in production technology, the introduction of corn hybrids, and economic factors, and not a result of climate change. (2) While there has been a warming trend for the United States as a whole, the temperature in the Mideast at the geographic mean location of corn production decreased by 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 20th century because the mean location shifted north much more than climate warmed. This trend indicates that factors other than climate have strong effects on the migration of production. Soybeans, for example, need just the right amount of sunlight each day to mature, so the geographic range of a particular variety is quite limited. The northern movement of the soybean crop is partly or largely due to the breeding of new varieties adapted to shorter summer days. (3) In the early years of the 20th century, the general expansion of agriculture westward into lands suitable for wheat in Oregon, Washington, and California contributed to the westward shift of production. Moreover, corn production became increasingly concentrated in the central United States, replacing wheat, which then shifted further west. In some sense, these large geographic shifts mean that crop production in the United States has experienced a climate change of as much as 4 degrees Celsius over the past century. The reasons for changes in the variability of crop yield are more complex. Likely factors include the fact that cropping was increasingly concentrated in areas better suited for production, farmers were able to adopt technologies to reduce the risk of climate factors--such as irrigation and grain drying. Federal farm programs that reduced the risk of economic loss of farmers may, on the other hand, have contributed to increased yield variability by encouraging production in areas that were subject to greater climate variability. (4) Thus, climate change is not likely the dominant force driving changes in yield variability or the location of production over the past 100 years. Simulating the Future To consider the production effects of climate change on agriculture in the future, we conducted crop modeling studies at 45 sites in the United States for wheat, corn, soybeans, potatoes, citrus fruits, tomatoes, sorghum, rice, and hay under dryland and irrigated conditions for two scenarios of climate change. …
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development -- the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 -- was to be the moment in which states would cooperate for the protection of the global environment. More heads of state than had ever come together to discuss any issue would meet to sign conventions on global climate change and biological diversity, to forge principles on environment and development and sustainable forestry, and to chart a course for a sustainable future. With its emphasis on development, the Earth Summit was supposed to heal the 20-year rift between Northern and Southern countries and to dispel the notion that Northern environmental concern was a ruse to slow Southern progress. Yet this confluence of state power was not satisfying to the environmental activists who had hoped that states would finally contend with the role of multinational corporations in the devastation of the environment. They left Rio with the feeling that they had been cheated. Multinationals, they argued, had much more access and influence at the conference than these corporations should have had. Corporate preferences were clearly articulated in conference conventions, declarations of principles, and Agenda 21. (1) Multinational corporations, they claimed, had successfully precluded stronger statements about the need to make serious changes for the environment while promoting free trade. Thanks to these companies, lamented the activists, there was no action on the regulation of multinational corporations across borders. The UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, which had been working on a code of conduct for multi-nationals, was relieved of its independent status just before the Earth Summit, and the critical report that it had prepared for Agenda 21 was not accepted by the Earth Summit Secretariat in time for inclusion. (2) Changing Course Instead, the secretary general of the Earth Summit, Maurice Strong, invited a Swiss businessman, Stephen Schmidheiny, to be his principal advisor for business and industry. (3) Schmidheiny accepted the offer and gathered together about 50 executives to create the Business Council for Sustainable Development. Participating executives represented Dow Chemical, DuPont, 3M, Mitsubishi, and Chevron, among others. In preparation for the Earth Summit, the council prepared a manifesto: Changing Course. In Changing Course, the council agreed with the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Report that sustainable development could be achieved only through economic growth. The council argued that this growth could be realized through open international trade. Although the report recognized that some government regulation would be necessary to shape sustainable development, particularly by harmonizing patchwork environmental regulations, it argued that much of this change should take place through market mechanisms and the voluntary efforts of firms and industries. Smart, strategic firms would demonstrate their ability to protect the environment and make profits at the same time. Despite the report's fears that the GATT and NAFTA talks would fall through, significant trade barriers were down by 1995. These barriers were removed, in part, because multinational corporations and industry organizations convincingly made the case that they could protect the environment through the implementation of corporate voluntarism. Summit Failures Many environmental nongovernmental organizations--popularly known as NGOs--still feel the sting of multinational corporate victories at the Earth Summit. That sting, along with a variety of state efforts to deregulate international trade since, has galvanized them. So, while multinational corporations have been enjoying the fruits of free trade--despite painful competition and consolidation--they have been under attack from a nascent but growing anti-globalization movement.4 Increasingly, over the past 10 years, multinational corporations have struggled to maintain dominance in a turbulent global economy while defending themselves against the argument that they want to eat the world's cake and save it for tomorrow, too. …
For far too many people, concepts like environmentalism and growth are oxymorons. These people see big business and good environmental and social outcomes as mutually exclusive. They cannot reconcile the vision of sustainability with continued economic growth. Not surprisingly, they cite the industrial excesses of the 20th century to support their skepticism about a future leadership role for business in making the world a better place. Many multinational corporations, however, are becoming better environmental stewards; and during the past decade, they've been working hard at being better corporate citizens, making increasingly greater contributions to important societal DuPont's own story parallels this shift in business values. Beginning in the late 1980s, DUPONT focused on corporate environmentalism. Today, that focus has evolved into a corporate emphasis on sustainable growth. Of course, the journey for DuPont has only just begun. Still, although we've already faced many challenges along the way, we've made significant progress and we have plans that should take us much further along the path toward a truly sustainable future. Corporate Environmentalism The role of business in protecting the environment has come a very long way during the past two decades. Many companies are now reducing waste and emissions well beyond what regulators demand and are carrying this same commitment to all of their global operations. For DuPont, the transformation began in the late 1980s when Ed Woolard, chairman and CEO at the time, took three important steps: * He defined DuPont's direction as environmentalism--a commitment to be where the public wants us to be in environmental protection, not just where the regulations tell us to be. * He committed DuPont to achieving aggressive environmental goals over the decade of the 1990s, even though we did not know how we might begin meeting many of those goals. * And, finally, he took the title of chief environmental officer, demonstrating his personal commitment to greater environmental performance. Early in journey, we made several key decisions to ensure progress. formed an Environmental Policy Committee of the Board of Directors to provide oversight and to audit programs. created a senior management level Environmental Leadership Council, which met monthly to ensure the commitment of resources and to encourage and audit progress toward Ed Woolard's challenging goals. also created a Corporate Environmental Plan for achieving the Woolard goals. DuPont leadership sought ideas and solutions from workforce around the world, tapping a vast pool of talent and enthusiasm. At the suggestion of a plant operator at one of manufacturing sites, for instance, we created an Environmental Excellence Awards program to recognize outstanding achievements and build environmental stewardship as a core value across global corporation. were also one of the first corporations to publish an annual Environmental Progress Report. Both the awards program and the progress report have continued annually since 1991. Business Integration One of the first steps we took was to upgrade environmental policy, which had been last updated in 1971. Since we wanted to broaden thinking and create the greatest possible buy-in, we sought ideas from a broad cross-section of DuPont people and experts from outside the company to help shape new corporate commitment to safety, health, and the environment. The result was DuPont's first policy statement addressing sustainable growth: We will implement those strategies that build successful businesses and achieve the greatest benefit for all stakeholders without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. also committed ourselves to strengthening our businesses by making safety, health and environmental issues an integral part of all business activities and by continuously striving to align businesses with public expectations. …
As recently as 100 years ago, old-growth tropical forests blanketed much of the Asia-Pacific. Today, great swaths of formerly forested land are denuded, replaced not so much by cities and roads and productive agricultural land as by weeds and floods and eroded soils. Natural forests now cover only about half of Indonesia, Laos, and Cambodia, and less than half of Malaysia and Burma. Elsewhere, it's even worse. Forests cover less than a quarter of Thailand and less than a fifth of the Philippines. It's better in Melanesia, where forests still cover three-quarters of the land, but that's only because there are fewer people, and encroachment, with its associated destruction of natural resources, has only recently begun. The destruction of so much natural forest has left the Asia-Pacific region with little remaining frontier forests--areas that the World Resources Institute defines as large and pristine enough to still retain full biodiversity. Almost 95 percent of Asia's frontier forests are now gone. What remains is mostly on the islands of Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and New Guinea, with smaller pockets in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. The Philippines no longer has frontier forests and similar losses in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Burma will soon follow. Cambodia now has just 10 percent of its frontier forests, Malaysia 15 percent, Indonesia 25 percent, and Papua New Guinea only 40 percent. (1) The loss of frontier forests, through deforestation and forest degradation in the Asia-Pacific, has resulted in severe social and environmental problems. The rate of soil erosion in the Philippines, for example, is one of the world's highest, putting even greater social and environmental pressures on increasingly scarce land, as once fertile agricultural land becomes eroded and barren. Logged forests--with open patches and drier forest floors--are also more susceptible to devastating fires. In 1997 and 1998 alone, five to 10 million hectares (12 to 25 million acres) of land burned in Indonesia. In many areas that were once rich in frontier forests, indigenous people have been uprooted. For those people, the disappearance of frontier forests means the loss of their homes and, all too often, the loss of their culture. Every government in the region now recognizes deforestation as an urgent environmental, economic, and social problem; and in recent years, those governments have responded with new policies and tougher rules. Yet, the problem continues, virtually unabated, and, in some cases, is getting worse. In Indonesia, for example, annual deforestation has risen to between 1.7 and 2.4 million hectares, far higher than in the 1980s and early 1990s. (2) Timber Companies at the Center A constellation of factors explains the inability of governments in the Asia-Pacific to slow deforestation. Poverty, large populations, and unstable land tenure all play a role, as do politics and markets and institutions. At the center, however, are the firms that log the old-growth forests. Often, these firms do not clear the forest; yet, they do irreparable damage to the integrity of the ecosystem, leaving the forests unable to regenerate. Roads and trails also leave these forests more vulnerable to encroachment from plantation developers and farmers. The scale of logging in the AsiaPacific has been extraordinary. Over the last four decades, much of the Philippines' timber has been harvested. Once the world's largest tropical timber exporter, by the mid-1990s, the Philippines had become a net importer of tropical timber. This tragic history is being repeated elsewhere in the region. At recent logging rates, and under current practices, loggers will largely deplete the old-growth forests of commercial timber in East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) within 10 years, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea within 15 years, and Indonesia within 15 to 20 years. Timber firms have been quick to declare their commitment to new logging policies and procedures in response to government inspectors and environmental and community critics. …
The concept of sustainable development has as many definitions as there are experts in the field. In its simplest form, however, sustainable development means living on nature's income rather than on its capital, thus ensuring a better quality of life now and for generations to come. Sustainable development-- from a business point of view--can be compared to a Greek temple with three pillars. The three pillars of sustainable development--economic growth, ecological balance and social progress--are themselves built on a three-tiered foundation. The first tier comprises eco-efficiency--producing more goods and services while using fewer resources and producing less waste and pollution--technological innovation, and corporate social responsibility. The foundation's second tier includes government incentives and the flexibility that business needs to become more sustainable. The third and final tier consists of the financial markets that drive the sustainability engine. Resting on the three pillars are two beams supporting the roof of sustainable development. The two beams sit rather precariously on the pillars below, and for this reason, I call them uncertainty and governance. Uncertainty and Governance A few years ago, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) (1) developed three global sustainable development scenarios to help its members formulate plans for the future. These scenarios looked at alternative worlds, and two parameters especially distinguished them: uncertainty and governance. In the business world, we are accustomed to dealing with the uncertainties of market demand, supplies, labor costs, and competitor activity. Today, additional elements of uncertainty that hang over all our decision-making include the effects of our activities on the ecosystem and a recent rise in social and cultural tensions. We still know relatively little about the ultimate status of the world's ecosystems and their resiliency. These uncertainties have us moving forward with our fingers crossed, hoping the world's ecosystems will be resilient enough to tolerate humankind's influence. Other questions also arise, such as what are the solutions to the present dismal global governance system, can we make markets function more sustainably, and will existing international institutions be capable of steering development in a more sustainable direction? The social pillar of our Sustainable Development Temple is getting a lot more attention today than it did just a few years ago. It is clear that society expects much more from companies than simply a well-made product or a reliable service at the right price. Society is becoming less and less tolerant of companies that fail to address their social responsibilities. As a result, corporate social responsibility has become a hot topic in boardrooms around the world. Financial markets, to a great degree, drive sustainable development. Indeed, if the markets do not reward sustainable behavior, progress will be slow. In recent years, however, many of the so-called green funds that use environmental criteria to screen their investments are outperforming traditional funds. During the period from December 1993 to June 2001, for example, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index--which comprises the 230 companies judged to be global leaders in sustainability--outperformed the Dow Jones Global Index by 2.5 percent. The Financial Times Stock Exchange, one of the world's leading global index providers, has also launched an index for socially responsible investment: the FTSE4 Good Index. This index is intended to facilitate investment in companies with good records of corporate social responsibility. New Business Assets The WBCSD was created in 1992 to coordinate the position of corporations on environmentally sustainable development at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. At that time, business involvement with sustainable development was generally viewed in terms of problems and risk factors. …
This last American living wilderness must remain sacrosanct. (1) --Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas In the far northeastern corner of Alaska remains the last great wilderness in the United States. Calling this area the last great wilderness is a statement not made lightly; people have been calling it that for almost 50 years. The name of the place is so often mentioned that even the most ardent sociophobe has probably heard of it: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. First created as the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960 by order of President Eisenhower's Secretary of the Interior, Fred Seaton, it subsequently doubled in size during the waning days of the Carter administration, through arm-twisting over the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Most of the original Arctic National Wildlife Range was subsequently designated wilderness, but under ANILCA, part of it was placed in a sort of legal limbo, to further study its oil and gas potential. The land that was set aside for further study was the infamous 1.5-million-acre coastal plain, also known as the area, after section 1002 of ANILCA, which calls for an assessment of the area. This coastal plain has endured over 20 years of pushing and shoving between oil and conservation interests, and the battle has come to a head once again. After the events of September 11, 2001, the call to decrease the United States' dependency on foreign oil is focusing enormous attention on Alaska's coastal plai n. Pristine Refuge Today, the Arctic Refuge is one of the finest remaining pristine areas on the planet, along with its two adjacent parks in Canada: Ivvavik and Vuntut National Parks. The Arctic Refuge is, of course, dwarfed by Antarctica and Greenland, but those two areas are almost entirely covered with ice. By contrast, the Arctic Refuge has a full complement of subarctic and arctic ecosystems without any introduced species. It is, for all practical purposes, just as it was thousands of years ago. Only 8 million acres (3.2 million hectares) are officially designated wilderness, but almost the entire place is de facto wilderness. The refuge is a very remote place, but in this age of airplanes, not as remote as you might think. From anywhere in the United States, you could be comfortably within its wilderness in two or three days, limited only by the weather and the schedule of your bush pilot. Still, few go there. The backcountry of the refuge sees fewer annual visitors than Curry Village in Yosemite Valley sees in a single summer Saturday. Unlike Yosemite Valley in the interior of the refuge you will see no ATM machines, banks, bars, stores, hotels, employee housing, paved trails, or horseback riders. There are no facilities or buildings at all that I know of, except for the tiny village of Kaktovik at the northern edge of the refuge on Barter Island, a few cabins down along the southern edge of the refuge, and a couple of small, abandoned, ballistic missile warning radar sites on the coast. There are no trail signs or even manmade trails. For all practical purposes, the refuge is utterly pristine. It also encompasses an area 26 times larger than Yosemite National Park, almost nine times the size of Yellowstone. I would trade either Yellowstone or Yosemite for the refuge in a heartbeat, and I have been to both many times in many seasons. The Wildest Place An odd champion of the Arctic Refuge, I am a petroleum geologist by trade. All of my income comes from oil and gas production. Perhaps what sets me apart from some of my colleagues is an intense love of wild places. Since my youth, I have traveled further and further into such places. My wandering eye eventually settled on Alaska, particularly the Brooks Range in the Alaskan Arctic. A 19-day paddle down the Noatak River through part of Gates of the Arctic National Park and the length of Noatak National Preserve clenched it. …
By the end of the 21st century the concentration of greenhouse gases from human activity in Earth's atmosphere is expected to double from preindustrial values. Many believe this increase will cause a 2 to 5 degree Celsius (3.6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in Earth's temperature. These projections are based largely on government-sponsored U.S. and foreign Global Computer Model simulations. These computer models use a number of complicated mathematical formulas to simulate the physical processes of the atmosphere and ocean circulation. They forecast future changes in the atmosphere and ocean by simultaneously solving an array of equations that are envisaged to represent the real physical processes of the Earth's climate system. There is some imprecision in the accuracy of these equations with regard to their ability to represent the real atmosphere. Time steps vary from about 15 minutes to an hour or so. They integrate this set of simultaneous equations for hundreds of thousands of time steps into the future. Separate calculations are made, which include and exclude the human-induced greenhouse gas inputs of carbon dioxide and methane. Though these models have become more sophisticated over the past few decades, the methodology appears to be compromised by two basic flaws. First, the models assume that more rainfall, resulting from the buildup of greenhouse gases, will lead to significant increases in atmospheric water vapor, especially in the upper atmosphere, and in cirrus cloudiness. These increases are presumed to significantly reduce the radiation energy sent back to space. To compensate for this assumed reduction in outgoing radiation to space, the globe must warm so that it can compensate for this reduced energy flux. Energy to space increases with global temperature. Observations and theoretical analysis by myself and others, however, suggest that reductions in outgoing radiation, due to increases in global rainfall, will be very small, and will not cause significant global warming. A second flaw in the Global Computer Model simulations is their inability to make realistic simulations of ocean circulation processes many decades into the future. Since about 70 percent of the atmosphere is in contact with the ocean surface, ocean circulation patterns are fundamental to climate variability. The primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, by far, is water vapor. It is the influence of the human-caused greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, on water vapor that is most in question. If the addition of human-induced greenhouse gases leads to an enhancement of water vapor's dominant influence (a positive feedback), then humans will, indeed, be responsible for significant warming. But it is more likely that the human-induced gases will act as a modulator (negative feedback) of water vapor's influence. If the human-induced greenhouse gases will act to slightly reduce water vapor's influence as a greenhouse gas, then little global warming will result. Most researchers agree that the Earth will rid itself of most of the positive energy gains from human-induced greenhouse gas by developing extra surface evaporation and compensating extra global rainfall, which has a cooling effect on the Earth's surface. The key question is how the atmosphere will respond to this expected increase in global evaporation rainfall. Will the expected increase in human-induced greenhouse gases cause a positive, a neutral, or a negative trend in net global outgoing radiation? The Global Computer Models are programmed to give large--and apparently unrealistic--reductions in outgoing radiation to space as global rainfall increases. As more-realistic computer simulations become available in the future, I believe we will learn that the runaway global warming scenarios predicted by current Global Computer Model technology grossly overestimate the actual threat, and that the small surface warming trends observed in global surface temperature during the last 25 to 100 years, which have been so highly touted in the press, are primarily of natural origin and not due to human influences. …
Carbon dioxide, generally believed to be the most important greenhouse gas and climate modifier, is today the centerpiece of a heated political and scientific debate. In its most polarized form, one side maintains that is the principal driver of climate, and the sequence of events is higher equals global warming equals climate change equals disaster. Based on this scenario, the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation will inexorably lead to global warming, with the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models projecting an average 1.5 to 5.5 degree Celsius temperature rise by the year 2100. Environmental Armageddon is an inevitable consequence of the above equation. The opposing view claims that the role of anthropogenic on climate has not been proved, and that there is, therefore, no need for the large expenditures necessitated by the emission-curtailment quotas, such as those mandated by the Kyoto protocol. As is usually the case with contenuous matters, the reality is likely in between, and the polarization arises mostly from two issues: (1) poor understanding of past variations in the carbon cycle and climate that must be taken into account as a baseline for any superimposed human impact, and (2) the uncertainties inherent in the climate models. This essay will deal mostly with the first subject, the carbon cycle, from the perspective of a geologist, contemplating it at time scales ranging from billions of years to the human life span. This perspective is essential, because events on progressively shorter time scales are embedded in, and constrained by, the evolution of the background on longer time scales. In terms of the second issue, the uncertainties inherent in the climate models, the admirable progress achieved by climate modeling must be acknowledged, but many serious pitfalls, such as the role of clouds, or the couplings to the oceanic and particularly the terrestrial biosphere (land plants), remain to be resolved. Considering that theoretical cooling by the clouds alone may potentially exceed, by up to 7.5 times, (1) the warming impact of the greenhouse gases, such concerns should be given due consideration and resolved prior to any definitive claims based on the climate scenarios. On the issue of modeling, I will restrict myself solely to the role of land plants in the carbon cycle because of their potential impact on the C[O.sub.2] sinks debate, which was the cause of failure of the Hague summit and a bone of contention during the Bonn meeting. Life, Water and the Carbon Cycle The story of the carbon cycle is essentially the story of life. Carbon and water are the fundamental building blocks of living things and the propagation of life is accomplished via continuous exchange of these two constituents with the atmosphere and hydrosphere (ocean and water bodies on land), such interactions being termed the water and the carbon cycle. While other cycles, such as those of nitrogen and phosphorus, are also involved, they are of lesser importance for the climate issues discussed here. In order to understand the role of atmosphere, water, and life for climate evolution in the geologic past, it is essential to study the ancient examples. Yet, we have no unequivocal samples of ancient waters, and the oldest samples of the ancient atmospheres are only about 420,000-year-old bubbles of air that were frozen into Antarctic ice at the time of its formation. The situation is somewhat better with the remnants of life, since mineralized shells go back to about 545 million years, and the impressions of living things, algae and bacteria, have been found in western Australia in rocks as old as 3.5 billion years. (2) Soft body tissues, altered by temperature and pressure, referred to as kerogen, have been found in still older rocks approaching 4 billion years. This is remarkable, because the oldest rocks ever recovered, found near Yellowknife in northwestern Canada, (3) are of about the same age. …
Will increased demand for groundwater and new population pressures put western farms out of business? Most people take water for granted. As long as it flows out of the tap in a relatively unadulterated form and doesn't look, smell, or taste bad, we give very little thought to where water comes from, how it got into our homes, or what impact changing water uses will have on our communities. In the arid western United States, however, one of the greatest natural-resource management problems in coming decades will be the quantity of available groundwater, its quality, and how it is to be used. In large sections of the West, groundwater is the only dependable source of water. For the 19 western states as a whole, roughly 35 percent of the water consumed comes from the ground. [1] Furthermore, dependence upon groundwater in many areas will increase in the future since the best surface water sources--rivers, lakes, and streams--have largely been developed or appropriated. As dependence on groundwater increases, a number of subtle shifts in local management policy, economics, and uses will occur. In areas where inexpensive surface water has been available, for example, additional agricultural expansion will be possible only through pumping more-expensive groundwater. In addition, population shifts from rural areas to cities will cause changes in patterns of land use, economic activity, and the sociopolitical composition of the area. The twin pressures of existing agricultural water use and the need to facilitate new population concentrations will, without proper management, eventually deplete groundwat er supplies through overdrafting, as water is extracted at a rate that exceeds recharge. [2] Moreover, as groundwater supplies become depleted, and the cost of water increases, the rising price will result in changes in water usage. In some areas, groundwater will become uneconomical for agricultural use, and the lands will revert to dry farming or go out of production altogether. These changes have social, political, aesthetic, and economic impacts and will change the character of local communities and the West as a whole. The importance of groundwater cannot be overstated. Resource at Risk It is estimated that more than 90 percent of freshwater in the United States is in the form of groundwater. The balance is in lakes, rivers, and streams. [3] Use of groundwater has increased dramatically in the recent past. From 1945 until 1980, groundwater use more than quadrupled, increasing from 21 billion to 88 billion gallons a day. [4] In the mid-1990s, approximately one-half of all the people in the United States used groundwater as a primary source of drinking water. [5] Nationally, groundwater provides 39 percent of the water used in public supply systems. Groundwater also provides 75 percent of the water used for rural domestic consumption and livestock purposes, 37 percent for irrigated agriculture, and 2 percent for self-supplied industrial purposes. [6] In the West, however, where 33 percent of the freshwater comes from groundwater sources, most of the water, 78 percent, goes for irrigated agriculture. Public supply systems consume 14 percent, and rural domestic and livestock use accounts for 4 percent. [7] Although these percentages vary significantly from state to state, it is clear that in the West, where agriculture plays a large role in the economy, groundwater will weigh heavily in determining the future and direction of the economy. And, as we might expect, shifts away from agricultural uses will have ripple effects throughout those economies. Unfortunately, despite its obvious importance, many people do not understand the nature of groundwater. The Resource When precipitation falls to the earth as rain or snow, some percolates through the soil to a water table, which is the top of what is referred to as the zone of saturation. A zone of saturation is also fed by surface water from wetlands, lakes, and streams. …
Since the known benefits of biotech foods outweigh the uncertain risks, the principle supports the use of such foods. In the 1980s, the principle migrated from its European roots to the international environmental scene. By 1992, it was ubiquitous: it appeared in the Rio Declaration, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). These precedents ultimately spawned the CBD's January 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which uses the principle as a basis for assessing the risk of international transfer, handling, and use of genetically modified organisms. This protocol is considered a major victory for the principle and its advocates. A popular formulation of the principle is the Wingspread Declaration: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not established scientifically. This principle has been interpreted by many to require--as measures--policies to curb technologies that science cannot prove to be absolutely safe. Specifically, it has been invoked to justify a ban on research, development, and deployment of genetically modified (GM) crops. [1] This application of the principle acknowledges the public health and environmental risks that a ban might reduce but ignores other risks that a ban might generate or prolong. Therefore, while the operation might be successful, the patient might die. Moreover, the principle provides no guidance in situations where actions such as a ban on GM crops could simultaneously generate uncertain benefits and uncertain harms. To avoid counterproductive precautionary policies, I propose a framework for applying the principle. This new approach provides a way to evaluate policies that might result in ambiguous outcomes because the harms might offset, in whole or in part, the benefits of GM crops. Using this framework, the principle can be used to answer a variety of difficult questions in the debate over GM crops. For example, do the public health and environmental benefits of GM crops exceed their harms? Considering the wide range of consequences of banning such crops, would the principle, in fact, justify such a ban? Finally, would a ban be consistent with the stated aims and objectives of the CBD and the Biosafety Protocol? [2] Competing Uncertainties This framework consists of a set of hierarchical criteria to rank various threats based on their characteristics and likely consequences. The first criterion is human mortality: the threat of death to any human, no matter how humble, outweighs similar threats to members of another species, no matter how magnificent. Moreover, the other nonmortal threats related to human health--such as blindness, stunting, additional days of sickness, or lowered educational attainment--should take precedence over threats to the environment, although exceptions might be made based on the nature, severity, and extent of the threat. This is the human morbidity criterion. These two criteria can be combined into the public health criterion. Additional criteria must be considered if an action under consideration results in both potential benefits and harms to public health or the environment. These other criteria include: * The immediacy criterion. All else being equal, more-immediate threats should be given priority over threats that could occur later. This criterion is justified because people tend to partially discount the value of lives that might be lost in the distant future. [3] * The uncertainty criterion. Threats of harm that are more certain should take precedence over those that are less certain if their consequences otherwise would be equivalent. …
New thinking and new settlement patterns can bring about urban sustainability. The American city, if one can still call such a sprawling, gray metropolis a city, is an ecological disaster. The way cities use land and resources profoundly alters the quality of the local and global environment. Uncontrolled growth devours land, water, and energy from the surrounding landscape. Contemporary settlement patterns create auto dependence, high energy demands for buildings, water pollution from excessive toxic runoff, air pollution, and such other adverse environmental effects as increased health risks caused by coal mining, nuclear waste, and fuel burning. For their exorbitant ecological price, these urban patterns do not even buy a high quality of life. Early 21st century Americans are separated from the aesthetic and ecological experience of nature while spending hours every day commuting and several more hours working to pay for their cars. Neighbors are not friends, community is not tied to place, and millions, too poor to own cars, are disenfranchised. The city is noisy, congested, frustrating, and unhealthy. Our society has created this habitat for ourselves. In addition to the global macro-ecological problems caused by or contributed to by cities, current settlement patterns create a host of local ecological problems. Wildlife habitat in cities is scarce; native species are replaced with consumptive exotics; streams are channelized, piped and buried; wetlands are filled and aquifers depleted. Urban heat islands drive up energy use for cooling and trap air pollutants in the city. Downstream areas are flooded and polluted by quick runoff from acres of paved surfaces. Each of these local problems reduces the ability of local ecosystems to accomplish their ecological functions. Local ecological systems are rapidly losing their ability to produce clean water, air, and food, and to maintain a rich variety of inhabitants- in short, they are losing the ability to sustain life. Each of these environmental problems is related in some way to the design of cities, to our settlement pattern, to our urban spatial structure. Changes in land-use patterns take decades, so if our cities are to be ready for mid-21st-century energy and resource scarcities, increasing population, and potential extinctions, structural changes must be initiated almost immediately. Human habitat must be restructured so that we live within the limits imposed by our life-sustaining ecosystems and follow the organizing principles by which all life flourishes. Green City Consciousness To correct the ecological damage caused by today's gray city, we first have to shift our perceptions. It is impossible to get us out of the urban ecological crisis with the same kind of thinking that created it. We have to learn to think ecologically. We also have to learn to integrate multiple new, and sometimes seemingly paradoxical, ways of thinking and perceiving. A sustainable city can be built on three interrelated mental models, each depending on a different set of values for what counts as success. * The city as a living system. This way of thinking asks, What form would the city take if we understood it as a manifestation of natural process? The central insight of the living city concept is that cities and landscapes are living systems. A city is a human ecosystem set in a landscape. Because living systems have been organized through 4 billion years of evolution, they constitute a design model for what sustains life on our planet. In particular, local ecosystems tell us what works well in our particular part of the planet. So, we can look at living systems to learn how to design buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and regions. To an ecologist, the order of an ecosystem is made up of two interrelated and inseparable patterns: structure and function. The structural pattern of a living system is the form, composition, distribution, and configuration of its parts--rocks, soil, plants, animals. …
The traffic planning process, with models forecasting travel demand based on solid demographic data and sophisticated simulation, often makes traffic problems worse. This is due to the process's inability to recognize that new road capacity itself induces more travel. This paper discusses the induced travel effect in detail, including the endless loop of road widenings and extensions followed by waves of induced traffic congestion. Ending the loop by not increasing road capacity will not lead to gridlock, political upheaval or loss of business as commonly feared. Instead, there will be a series of gradual, most beneficial, adjustments. Drivers will move their travel away from the most congested times, find alternative routes and reinvest in their urban neighborhoods rather than moving to suburban homes. More, smaller commercial destinations would be developed rather than fewer large ones. Other potential consequences of not building additional capacity are discussed.
By imitating natural processes, we can meet the water needs of current and future generations. All too often we read bold headlines claiming that the world is running out of water. Like so much of the information found in the media, such statements tend to exaggerate. So far, our planet is the only truly water-rich planet known in the universe. In retrospect, we might more accurately call the planet Water, not Earth. The hydrologic cycle is a fundamental system of our planet. Massive amounts of water fall from the atmosphere onto the land as liquid rain. There it freezes into a solid state or runs off into the seas, where it evaporates back into a gaseous state and returns to the atmosphere. After billions of years of modification and refinement, this gigantic machine continues to serve as our planet's life insurance policy, and the process requires no technological intervention from humans to maintain its integrity. As human populations expanded, however, they had profound effects on the water supply. Since time immemorial, people have faced water shortages resulting from droughts, floods, and contaminated supplies. The larger the population, the more severe the impacts. In past millennia, when Earth was less crowded, people simply moved to a new location when water supplies were contaminated by natural or human means or evaporated in extended periods of drought. For today's modern urban societies, however, relocation is not a viable option. Imitating Nature The cycle of finite resources used over and over has been fine-tuned over billions of years of evolutionary development on Earth. As the world's population grew, the need for resources grew accordingly and eventually became critical for the viability of human life. Fortunately, evolving ingenuity led to new discoveries that solved many of the problems associated with water distribution, treatment, waste management, and contamination. Today, most Americans have access to safe and reliable water supplies 24 hours a day, thanks to an array of remarkable technologies developed over the past 200 years. From the early 1800s until midway through the 20th century, the federal government encouraged the westward movement of the population by promoting agriculture and ensuring reliable water supplies. During that period, the federal government and private entrepreneurs built dams and crafted water-diversion schemes at an unprecedented pace. Though the heyday of such innovation and investment in infrastructure is over, these technologies continue to provide utility customers with the highest quality of water in the world. Unfortunately, technology can't reduce the demand for water, so water providers will need to turn again to human ingenuity to usher in a new era of innovations. California Dreaming Human populations have always settled along the shorelines of oceans, rivers, and lakes to take advantage of Mother Nature's remarkably efficient machine. People who settled near the oceans may have enjoyed plentiful seafood and pleasant climate but were faced with very limited potable water supplies. In the United States today, over 50 percent of the population lives near shorelines of one type or another, and 20 percent of the population now lives in the Sunbelt, which stretches from Florida to California across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These demographic shifts have placed increasing pressure on existing water supplies. The water needs of the Sunbelt, with a population of over 50 million, are enormous. Southern California alone has 17 million residents, and its water utility managers face a daily challenge to meet these residents' need for water. The current residents of southern California alone consume 1.7 billion gallons of water a day. On an annual basis, that's 620 billion gallons, or over 2 million acre-feet per year. If the current population stabilized at its current level, utility managers would probably not worry about water supply shortages in the near term. …
Polluted air is a major health hazard in many parts of the world, but it is particularly troublesome in some developing countries, where regulations governing air quality have traditionally been lax or nonexistent. The international health community currently believes suspended particulate matter--commonly known as dust--to be the most damaging among widely measured air pollutants. Ambient concentrations of particulates in many cities of the developing world routinely exceed the World Health Organization safety standard by a factor of three or more. (1) Particulate air pollution is a complex mixture of small and large particles of varying origin and chemical composition. Over time, health research on air pollution has narrowed its focus from all particles to small particles less than 10 microns in diameter ([PM.sub.10]) and, most recently, to particles whose diameters are less than 2.5 microns ([PM.sub.2.5]). Large particles usually contain dust and smoke from industrial processes, construction, agriculture, and road traffic, as well as plant pollen and other natural sources. Smaller particles generally originate from combustion of fossil fuels. These particles include soot from vehicle exhaust, which is often coated with chemical contaminants or metals, and fine sulfate and nitrate aerosols that form when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions condense in the atmosphere. The largest sources of fine particles are coal-fired power plants and motor vehicles. (2) Small particles are more dangerous because they can penetrate deep into the lungs, settling in areas where natural clearance mechanisms, like coughing, cannot remove them. The constituent elements in small particles also tend to be more chemically active and therefore more damaging. (3) Recent epidemiological studies have reported that exposure to particulates, particularly small particulates, is strongly associated with respiratory illness and death. (4) For urban residents in Latin America, some estimates suggest that particulates cause 65 million days of illness each year. (5) A 1996 study finds that particulate pollution has inflicted serious health damage on the 4.8 million inhabitants of Santiago, Chile, a city with particularly poor air quality. (6) Other research indicates that air pollution in Jakarta, Indonesia, is responsible for some 1,400 deaths, 49,000 emergency-room visits, and 600,000 asthma attacks per year. (7) Health effects of exposure to particulates range in severity from coughing and bronchitis to heart disease and lung cancer. Numerous studies have indicated that there is no critical threshold that governs safe exposure levels to particulate pollution. Damage increases with exposure, starting at very low concentration levels. As research on damage from particulate pollution has accumulated, policymakers in developing countries have begun modifying their traditional concern about diverting resources to pollution control when poverty, illiteracy, and infant mortality are still major problems. Their past hesitation has, in part, resulted from uncertainty about local pollution levels, but recently measurement of particulate pollution has become much more common. New Evidence The new monitoring data from developing countries are enabling researchers to provide much more detailed information about the scope and severity of particulate pollution. Using an econometric model calibrated to the latest data, our research team at the World Bank has recently developed estimates of ambient [PM.sub.10] concentrations for more than 3,200 cities. The model incorporates a number of factors, including population density, economic activity, fuel use, and meteorological conditions. The data show that average [PM.sub.10] concentrations in East Asia (mostly China) and South Asia (mostly India) are about four times higher than average concentrations in member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, while average concentrations are about twice as high in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. …
In a seminal paper written more than three decades ago, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the concept of the of the commons. (1) In simple terms, the tragedy of the commons arises when a commodity is under common ownership--or unowned--and everyone has a right to exploit it. The net result is that the commons gets overused. Any detriment resulting from exploitation of the commons is shared across all users. So, if I discharge one unit of a pollutant into a commonly used watercourse, my pollution will be dispersed so that each of 100 users will only suffer one 100th of the burden. What I forget, of course, is that if each of the other users also discharges one unit, I will get my own pollution back. As Hardin noted, in a commons brings ruin to all. Today, we are facing the tragedy of the commons at a global level. For years, for example, we fished the seas without concern over fish population dynamics, just as we now continue to burn fossil fuels with impunity. To put it in biological terms, the destruction of our global commons is the result of humans, as a species, exceeding the carrying capacity of their environment. The natural consequence, which some people proclaim is sooner or later inevitable, is a human population crash. Common Law In the traditional English common law system, lawsuits for environmental damage grow out of a definable measure of harm to property or person-that is, the claimant has suffered a loss because of some infringement to his or her special interest. Lawsuits in nuisance (2) or negligence (3) have both been successfully brought to address environmental wrongs. In the famous 19th century case of Rylands v. Fletcher, (4) in which water from a breached reservoir flooded a neighbor's mine, the court held that even though the property owner was not negligent, he was nonetheless liable for damage arising from the escape of unnatural substances held on his property. On the face of it, the court's holding in Rylands provides an obvious basis for a claim of environmental liability. In practice, however, the courts have adopted a restrictive approach to its application, preferring instead to rely on statutory provisions as a basis for liability. (5) In any event, none of these tortious rights is of any avail if the person affected has no interest in bringing a lawsuit or, after winning one, decides to use the awarded damages for something other than restitution. Similar difficulties arise in challenges to public administration and, in particular, actions against planning decisions. In an attempt to keep the floodgates closed against excessive lawsuits, the courts have adopted a cautious approach towards relaxing the rules concerning who has standing to sue. The basic rule of standing is that you cannot maintain a lawsuit unless you can show an interest in the matter over and above that of the public in general. Too narrow an interpretation of that rule has prevented special interest groups, such as various environmental organizations, from succeeding in challenges to administrative decisions. (6) Opportunities for citizens and nongovernmental organizations to redress environmental wrongs are therefore severely limited. Protecting the environment, in fact, is difficult unless you own it. Trees may have rights, (7) but the courts tend not to recognize them. No doubt, the surest way of safeguarding the environment from deliberate damage is to hold a proprietary interest in it. Not surprisingly then, powerful conservation organizations such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom and the Sierra Club in the United States are either major landowners of environmentally sensitive land or contributors to land acquisition. Freedom of the Commons It could be argued that ownership carries with it responsibilities as well as rights. Unfortunately, the concept of a duty of care applies to our relationship with our neighbors (8) but not, generally, to our environment. …
Exposure to indoor air contaminants has been a problem since the first cave-dwelling humans kindled fires and established vent holes in their cave roofs to carry away smoke. Ancient native Americans constructed noncave dwellings that also provided for exhaust of stale indoor air. Even in the Old Testament, Leviticus 14:34-57 offers instruction on how to deal with mildews and molds. The sources of indoor air pollution have changed since the days of campfires in caves, and now those sources commonly involve synthetic building materials, personal-care products, pesticides, and household cleaners. Moreover, tighter buildings--with less-permeable building envelopes, windows that don't open, and other structural changes developed in response to the energy crisis in the 1970s--have increased the number and types of contaminants released into the indoor environment, while decreasing the flow of fresh outdoor air into buildings. Behind Closed Doors Americans spend up to 90 percent of their time indoors, where concentrations of pollutants are often much higher than those outside. Risk assessments performed for radon and environmental tobacco smoke have shown that the health risks associated with exposure to these indoor pollutants are substantial. A recent National Academy of Sciences report, for instance, concludes that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the nation. (1) The academy estimates that about 15,000 to 22,000 cases of lung cancer and 12 percent of lung cancer deaths each year in the United States are linked to radon. By way of comparison, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported about 42,000 traffic fatalities in the United States in 1997. (2) Environmental tobacco smoke is estimated to cause an additional 3,000 lung cancer deaths (3) and 35,000 to 62,000 cardiovascular deaths each year among nonsmokers. (4) Environmental tobacco smoke also causes a host of serious health effects in children. In particular, it annually aggravates asthma in up to a million children and causes between 150,000 and 300,000 lower-respiratory-tract infections in infants and children under 18 months of age. (5) It is also associated with 1,900 to 2,700 cases of sudden-infant-death syndrome and 9,700 to 18,600 cases of low birth weight in infants. (6) Other studies show significant health effects from additional indoor contaminants. Carbon monoxide poisoning, for instance, is associated with the improper use and maintenance of fuel-burning appliances; it kills more than 200 people each year in this country and results in about 10,000 admissions to hospital emergency rooms. (7) The agent that causes Legionnaires' disease, a potentially deadly pneumonia that affects 10,000 to 15,000 people each year, is associated with cooling systems, whirlpool baths, humidifiers, and other indoor sources. (8) Effects associated with environmental toxins from indoor fungi and bacteria range from short-term irritation to immuno-suppression and cancer. (9) Breath Robbers More recently, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine issued a report on asthma and indoor air quality, confirming that dust mites and other allergens, microorganisms, and some chemicals found indoors are important triggers for asthma. The report also stated that preschool children exposed to either environmental tobacco smoke or house dust mites are more likely to develop asthma. (10) In 1987, the Comparative Risk Project of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency examined the relative risk of various environmental problems; and in 1990, the Relative Risk Reduction Strategies Committee of EPA's Scientific Advisory Board conducted a similar, extensive analysis of relative environmental risk. The resulting reports, Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of Environmental problems (11) and Reducing Risk: Setting Priorities and Strategies for Environmental protection, (12) ranked indoor air pollution among the top five environmental risks to public health. …
