U.N. report warns environment is at tipping point

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The earth's environmental systems "are being pushed towards their biophysical limits," beyond which loom sudden, irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes, the United Nations Environment Program warned Wednesday.

By Felipe Dana, AP

Brazil's Secretary of Research and Development Programs and Politics, Ministry of Science and Technology, Carlos Nobre, speaks during the launch of U.N. Environment Program Global Environment Outlook 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday.

By Felipe Dana, AP

Brazil's Secretary of Research and Development Programs and Politics, Ministry of Science and Technology, Carlos Nobre, speaks during the launch of U.N. Environment Program Global Environment Outlook 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday.

In a 525-page report on the health of the planet, the agency paints a grim picture: The melting of the polar ice caps, desertification in Africa, deforestation of tropical jungles, spiraling use of chemicals and the emptying out of the world's seas are just some of myriad environmental catastrophes posing a threat to life as we know it.

"As human pressures on the earth … accelerate, several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded," the report says. "Once these have been passed, abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet are likely to occur, with significant adverse implications for human well-being."

Such adverse implications include rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, and the collapse of fisheries, said the report, which compiles the work of the past three years by a team of 300 researchers.

The bad news doesn't end there. The report says about 20 percent of vertebrate species are under threat of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38 percent since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, and 90 percent of water and fish samples from aquatic environments are contaminated by pesticides.

It adds that of the 90 most crucial environmental goals, little or no progress has been made over the past five years on nearly a third of them, including global warming. Significant progress has been made on just four of the objectives, the report says.

"This is an indictment," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said at a news conference in Rio De Janeiro, which is to host later this month a U.N. conference on development that protects the environment. "We live in an age of irresponsibility that is also testified and documented in this report.

"In 1992 (when the first of the agency's five reports was released) we talked about the future that was likely to occur. This report 20 years later speaks to the fact that a number of the things that we talked about in the future tense in 1992 have arrived," Steiner said. "Once the tipping point occurs, you don't wake up the next morning and say, 'This is terrible, can we change it?' That is the whole essence of these thresholds. We are condemning people to not having the choice anymore."

Steiner called for immediate action to prevent continued environmental degradation, with its ever-worsening consequences.

"Change is possible," he said, adding that the report includes an analysis of a host of environmental preservation projects that have worked. "Given what we know, we can move in another direction."

The United Nations' upcoming Rio+20 conference on sustainable development would be the ideal forum to spearhead the kind of global action that's needed if the worst is to be avoided, Steiner said.

However, the run-up to June 20-21 conference has been plagued with problems, as developing and developed countries continue to bicker over what the objectives of the event should be.

Speaking in New York on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that negotiations on a final document for the conference have been "quite difficult" but he said he was "cautiously optimistic" that the 193 U.N. member states will reach agreement.

"We live in a world of economic uncertainty, growing inequality and environmental decline," Ban told a news conference at U.N. headquarters. "This (conference) is a once in a generation opportunity. … We need leaders to have political commitment and political courage and vision. Short-term measures will not be the answers. You need to have mid- and longer-term visions for sustainable development."

UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said the agency deliberately scheduled the release of its report to coincide with the run-up to the conference.

"It tells, we hope in a polite way, but in a scientifically honest way, world leaders who are coming in a few weeks' time why they are coming and why they need to define an impressive outcome for everybody in the world," Nuttall said at the Rio news conference.

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Japan's post-tsunami revival plan reaches tipping point (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) – Nine months after a historic magnitude 9.0 earthquake unleashed a deadly tsunami that wreaked havoc across Japan's northeast, the nation, armed with $155 billion in funding, is entering a critical stage of the rebuilding effort.

Damaged railways and major roads are mostly fixed with at least temporary repairs, two-thirds of ruined ports have been restored and 47,000 households moved from emergency shelters to temporary housing.

Of 22 million tonnes of rubble, two-thirds have been cleaned up, but final disposal remains a dangerous challenge because of concerns about radiation that spewed from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

All the recovery efforts were made possible by initial emergency budgets totaling 6 trillion yen ($77.19 billion).

Now Tokyo and local officials must produce a plan to "build better" to give the region, long beset by a shrinking and ageing population and lack of investment, a chance of revival.

The tsunami-hit area accounts for about 6-7 percent of Japan's economic output, but the stakes are high for the entire nation. Policymakers, investors and companies are counting on the rebuilding effort to give the $5 trillion economy a jolt needed to keep it from sliding back into recession under the weight of a global slowdown and fears of contagion from Europe's debt crisis.

People and businesses, pessimistic about the region's future however, are packing up. More than 38,000 residents left the area between March and August, the biggest exodus since 1969. Of those that remain, 180,000 out of the region's 5.7 million residents have filed jobless claims between March and October, 70 percent more than a year earlier.

"The people who evacuated the area after the disaster won't feel compelled to return unless they can find stable jobs, so reconstruction without job creation would be a failure," said Hideo Kumano, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.

"That money will finally flow in is a good news, but it is not a guarantee of a self-sustaining recovery of quake-hit areas."

So far the news is not encouraging. Plans to modernize the struggling fishing industry or move coastal communities to higher ground, a precondition for large-scale rebuilding and investment, have been slow to materialize.

Overwhelmed local bureaucracies, opposition from fishing cooperatives and the need to win the hearts and minds of skeptical residents are getting in the way.

"Unless we can have accords with local people, we cannot proceed with rebuilding projects because there is a possibility of opposition," says a regional official in Miyagi, one of the three prefectures worst hit by the March 11 disaster.

That means it may take months before rebuilding funds start flowing to projects on the ground, local officials say.

OLD BUSINESSES, OLD PEOPLE

The national government is promising five-year tax holidays and light-touch regulation on fishing rights, land use and other issues to those who will invest in special industrial zones in disaster-hit areas. Foreign businesses are also eligible.

Industrial parks focused on automotive parts or medical equipment production as well as renewable energy projects such as wind farms are among ideas proposed by Tokyo.

The process of deciding what to build and where has only just started and only 10 out of 19 municipalities requiring rebuilding in Miyagi prefecture have reconstruction plans ready. In neighboring Iwate, eight out of 12 have such plans.

Reconstruction experts say a shortage of qualified planning professionals is one of the obstacles.

"The fact that many of quake-hit cities and towns are scarcely populated has made it difficult for local officials to create rebuilding plans on their own," said Yoshiyuki Aoki, a senior official of the government's reconstruction office in Tokyo.

He says that, whereas the 1995 Kobe quake hit residential areas constantly under redevelopment, much of the northeast has no recent history of re-zoning and city planning and lacks experts. Tokyo wants to rectify that by sending a team of specialists to help, Aoki says.

Re-establishing the fishing industry is another tough question facing planners.

Cooperatives are defending a system that only loosely ties fishermen with processing firms and retailers, but keeps rivals out and Miyagi governor's initiative to open the business to outsiders got drowned in protests.

Shigeru Tabeta, professor of ocean technology and environment at the University of Tokyo who is assisting with rebuilding of port towns, says preserving the status quo is self-defeating.

Tax breaks and incentives will only work if Japan opens its protected farming and fisheries to foreigners, experts say.

With no magic bullet in sight, spending more on a solid safety net may be the only way to keep communities intact until revitalization plans materialize, says Iwao Sato, sociology of law professor at the University of Tokyo.

His survey of the fishing town of Kamaishi showed more than a third of residents were out of work, compared with a fifth before the quake while the population of self-employed has fallen to 17 percent from 28 percent.

"The government has mostly focused on building seabanks, elevating land levels and other infrastructure development," Sato says. "But more attention is probably needed on supporting the livelihoods of people through direct assistance on employment and homes, or else people will leave."

($1 = 77.7300 Japanese yen)

(Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Matthew Driskill)

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