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Deforestation and Public Policy
| Article
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20588 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
2,897 Words |
| Author
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Patricia Parisi and Michael H. Glantz
Patricia Parisi is a research assistant with the Environmental
and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Michael H. Glantz
is program director of the group. |
Global environmental change has become one of the most salient scientific and political issues of the 1990s. People and their governments have begun to realize that their societies have been fouling their environments at least since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s.
Global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, deforestation, human-induced sea level rise, and desertification are some of the major environmental changes that are or could be already under way today. Making a bad situation worse are the continually expanding population numbers that are sure to burden dwindling resources. Degradation of the natural environment is increasingly being seen as an impediment to achieving sustainable economic development. Thus, interest in as well as concern about the causes and consequences of environmental change have increased sharply in the past few years.
What makes an environmental issue a global problem? Whether environmental degradation is considered a local problem or a global problem will most likely determine how it is addressed. Some environmental changes are considered global in origin: a natural warming or cooling of the global atmosphere or a period of change in solar activity that might affect global atmospheric processes. Others are considered global in effect although they might be local in origin: volcanic eruptions that alter the chemistry of the atmosphere on a global scale for lengthy periods of time or the local emissions of heat-trapping (greenhouse) gases.
Deforestation and desertification are two environmental changes that are local in origin and impact but have been labeled as global problems because they are occurring in many countries and have attracted worldwide interest.
In the 1970s a series of UN conferences was convened to address these and other issues pertinent to the environment. The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June can be viewed as the capstone to these many conferences, as it brought together political leaders from around the world for the purpose of addressing the global environment. From the Earth Summit came the Framework Convention on Climate Change, a biodiversity treaty, and Agenda 21, an environment and development agenda for the twenty-first century.
The catalyst for such a summit was the growing concern about a human-induced global warming of the lower atmosphere. Scenarios about the possible implications of a global warming have been generated by computer-based
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