On the home website of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there is a quotation of a seventeen year old that is prominently displayed on the top left hand corner of the page, which states in one simple sentence: “We need to concentrate on dreams and solutions, not problems.” I have taken this insightful comment of a remarkably wise member of our younger generation and incorporated it as part of the heading for my presentation. Therefore, it is my intention in this presentation to address environmental issues from a solution-based framework and not dwell too long on its myriad problems, which many of you are all too familiar with by now.
The solution-based approach becomes even more important when we look at the many global, regional and national problems and challenges that we are confronted with almost on a daily basis. Pick up any newspaper or magazine today, and we are deluged with a string of terrible news. On the one hand, we have reports of large scale earthquakes, floods, windstorms, mudslides, brush fires and other natural disasters. Most of these natural events are generally out of our control —all we can do is to mobilize our resources to mitigate its worst consequences.
On the other hand, we are confronted by a vast array of problems that are seemingly unrelated to natural events, but are products of human activity and neglect. We witness growing population and increasing poverty in many developing regions of the world. These trends are compounded by a chronic lack of adequate food, shelter, clean water, medical services and other basic needs for a large proportion of people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Each day, more impoverished people from rural areas move into large cities and towns in developing countries, aggravating an already congested and polluted urban environment. In this age of widespread affluence, one third of the world’s population still subsists on less a dollar a day. According to the World Health Organization, 12 million children under the age of five die each year from causes that are largely preventable.
In some ways, the future looks bleaker today than ever, especially for the poor children of the world. Hundreds of millions of children today are either chronically hungry or severely malnourished, or they suffer from a variety of diseases, and thus have little chance of living to a full and productive adulthood. Even in a highly developed country such as the United States, it is estimated that one out of five young children live in poverty, some of them homeless and without access to bare necessities of life.
With a growing world population and its increasing demand for food, fiber and shelter, human beings have now placed an enormous strain on our natural environment. While this trend had been anticipated by many, the societal impact on our forests, farmlands, coastal regions, freshwater bodies and grasslands has been unprecedented and in some cases quite severe. For instance, more than 60% of the world’s forests have been disturbed or irreparably damaged by some form of human activity, such as logging and mining operations or land clearing for agricultural uses. In recent years, deforestation in tropical areas have declined at the rate of some 130,000 square kilometers per year, a total net decline of 10% of tropical forested lands since 1980. In contrast, during the same period of time, there has been a small, but noticeable net increase of forested areas in developed regions of the world. Another natural resource problem that is gaining more attention in recent years is the tragic loss of fish stock in many coastal and marine areas of the world. This loss has been blamed on a variety of factors, such as overfishing, poor fishing techniques, loss of habitats and from excessive exposure to agricultural fertilizers and pesticides.
While I stated at the outset that we shall not dwell on the fine details of the global environmental problem, but to search for practical and farreaching solutions, I also wanted to give you an overall sense of the magnitude of the challenges we are faced with today. The question I would like to pose now is as follows: given the enormous problems and challenges we have thus far delineated, how do we go about finding adequate means and long-lasting solutions to start addressing them.
Let me state at once that there are simply no easy solutions to these societal and environmental problems. Though each issue should be seen separately and examined on their own merit, they should not be viewed in isolation to other related problems. In fact, over the past few decades, we have made many mistakes by not paying proper attention to one of the cardinal principles of nature, which is that all things are interconnected and must be accounted for and not summarily ignored.
For instance, it is now believed that the landmark clean water legislation enacted in the early 1970s in the United States—which prohibited chemical discharges into lakes and streams—led inevitably to the creation of many toxic dump sites, with subsequent widespread contamination of groundwater in many parts of the country. This was, if you will, the result of a piecemeal and less-than-integrated way of thinking on the part of the environmental regulatory community and by a combination of ignorance and negligence by the private sector. I am afraid that in many rapidly industrializing countries today, such as India, China, Brazil and Mexico, similar mistakes of land-based toxic waste disposals are being made even as we speak, with unknown consequences for the future. It seems at times we can only learn our errors the hard way—by repeating the same cost ineffective and failed approaches that have led to many, what should have been, highly preventable environmental problems.
I shall try to answer the question I had posed a moment ago by looking at two successful environmental case studies—one at the global level and the other local in scope—which I hope will illustrate how a solution-based approach, using sound scientific and technical knowledge, complemented by human creativity, imagination and a little bit of common sense, can go a long way to bring about a more environmentally sustainable future. One other ingredient that must not be forgotten in this solution-based approach, which is never leave a problem to be solved by experts alone. All successful efforts always include the non-experts— people in the community must be involved or be given a special role to play in order to really make a difference in the long run.
The first case study I have chosen is truly global in nature—the potential destruction of our protective ozone layer in the stratosphere by manmade chemicals. The most prominent class of chemicals that were implicated in this destructive process were popularly known as Freon—a trademark name of the Dupont Chemical Company for a group of halogenated hydrocarbon compounds that contained both fluorine and chlorine atoms.
At one time, these compounds, known by most academic scientists as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, were considered to be nearly miraculous substances. They had remarkable physical and chemical properties and could be used in a variety of consumer products. For example, they were used initially as relatively safe refrigerant fluids for air conditioners and refrigerators. You may remember that only a few decades ago they were used extensively as propellants in aerosol cans—in fact, in the late 60s and early 70s, over two-thirds of all CFCs manufactured in the world were used in aerosol cans for consumer products, such underarm deodorants and shaving creams. But its most unusual property was its low chemical reactivity, which meant that CFCs had little or no potential acute human toxicity.
But, something went terribly wrong for these miracle compounds. In the early 70s, two physical chemists—Dr. Sherwood Rowland and Dr. Mario Molina, both at the University of California, Irvine—discovered that the chemically inert CFCs, while extremely stable in the lower atmosphere, could potentially break down in the stratosphere, some seven kilometers above the earth’s surface. Under intense UV radiation in the stratosphere, they postulated that CFCs underwent photochemical reactions to form highly reactive chlorine free radicals. These reactive chemical species could in turn reduce a significant fraction of ozone molecules to plain ordinary oxygen molecules in the stratosphere.
The overall result of these chemical chain reactions in the stratosphere was a significant loss of ozone molecules, which for millions of years shielded the earth’s surface and its ultravioletsensitive species (including humans) from the harmful effects of low wavelength UVB radiation. While nonessential uses of CFCs, such as aerosol propellants, were being phased out in the United States by the late 1970s, the use of these substances had, by the early 1980s, risen dramatically for use in new car air conditioners and home and commercial refrigerators.
Then occurred an event of great consequence in the history of environmental science and public policy—a group of scientists who were stationed in the Antarctica, noticed that a huge ozone hole developed each spring over the south polar region, which lasted for many weeks at a time. At this point, even the most skeptical critic of the stratospheric ozone depletion theory, which included many scientists in the chemical industry, had to concede that an unprecedented event of major proportion was happening to the global environment.
The rest, as they say, is history. Within a few years after the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, most governments of the world signed and ratified the Montreal Protocol, which called for an orderly and step-by-step phase out of all CFCs and other similar halogenated compounds by the beginning of this century. The moral of this story is this —the worldwide scientific community participated in a joint effort to elucidate and verify the original stratospheric ozone depletion theory. The pioneering work of these scientists, many of whom worked closely with key policy makers and provided technically sound information to the media and the general public, led to the adoption of an international treaty that has brought an end to the global use of a potentially harmful class of compounds in a most rational and timely manner. In recognition of their stellar scientific contribution, Drs Rowland and Molina, along with their Dutch scientific colleague, Dr Paul Crutzen, shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995.
The second case study I would like to present today deals with a city in Brazil called Curitiba, whose extraordinary success in urban planning and transportation systems has become the envy of its neighboring communities, if not the rest of the world. Curitiba is a metropolis of over two million inhabitants, located several hundred kilometers south of Sao Paulo in the province of Parana. Back in the early 1970s, under the inspired leadership of its mayor, Mr. Jaime Lerner—a descendant of immigrant Polish family—Curitiba embarked on a series of urban and social experiments that I can barely touch upon today to give it proper justice:
It built one of the first pedestrian street malls in the world, initially in opposition to local downtown merchants and enraged car drivers, who later became its strongest proponents. It built one of the best city transportation systems in the world, with a network of well-designed and rider-friendly buses that move at rush hour along express lanes at intervals of one minute apart. In fact, it resembles an above ground subway system of a major metropolitan area, but was built at a fraction of costs of constructing and operating an underground system. It has maintained its urban transportation system with the full and enthusiastic support of its inhabitants—three-quarters of its commuters use the network of buses on a regular basis, since it has reduced daily travel time by an average of 40 minutes. At present, over 200 kilometers of wellmaintained and dedicated bike lanes crisscross the city, providing ready and safe access to all parts of the metropolitan region. The net result of Curitiba’s remarkable public transportation system is that it has the lowest rate of car ridership and the cleanest air in Brazil, while using onefourth less petroleum fuel per capita of any city in the country.
Since the 1970s, Curitiba has expanded and built new public parks, open-green spaces and cultural centers in many parts of the city, with naturally protected areas along river banks and urban corridors. It has established numerous botanical gardens, historical sites, bird sanctuaries and urban farms. Today, Curitiba is one of the greenest cities of its size in the world, both figuratively and literally speaking. Above all, Curitiba has provided a warm, caring and people-oriented urban environment for all its inhabitants. It provides a string of well-managed social services for both its affluent and its less fortunate citizens. It has created a network of inexpensive childcare centers, well-run schools and recycling programs. It has even started a successful garbage pickup services in its low-income neighborhoods with their impassably narrow streets, where municipal workers exchange free food for voluntary collection of trash by young people in the community. This innovative idea is now fittingly called the Green Exchange project.
The question I would now like to pose is: how was this minor miracle in urban planning achieved in such a short a period of time in a developing country? As I mentioned earlier, much credit goes to its charismatic mayor, who has been described as someone who has “the brain of a technocrat and the soul of a poet. ” It is interesting to note that Mr. Lerner was originally trained as an architect and engineer, and only later became an urban planner extraordinaire and a true visionary. But there is more to the story of Curitiba, since very little can be accomplished by one person alone, without the support, creativity and energy of many others. This is particularly true of Curitiba, where from its inception, the mayor brought managers, professionals and the public together to help advise, plan and implement the goals and objectives of building an environmentally sustainable community.
Today, for instance, many of the city’s municipal departments are led by women, with a large proportion of architects on their staff. The picture of the traditional city bureaucrat sitting in some dreary office pushing mounds of paper around simply doesn’t fit in here. With Curitiba as our gold standard, municipal governments could be a place where urban planning becomes a fruitful partnership of open-minded and imaginative professionals and dedicated and committed citizens who work together to create an metroplitan environment that they could proudly pass on to their children and grandchildren.
In addition to the two case studies I have presented here today, there are many other solution-based examples that give us hope for the future. Some of these examples are well-documented in a recent volume published by the World Resources Institute, prepared in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank, entitled World Resources 2000-2001, “People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life”.
In this volume, one finds very encouraging case studies of wellmanaged ecosystem plans and natural resource conservation projects, such as:
• Saving a semiarid region of Kenya, in the Machako hillsides,
• Introducing a full scale sustainable agricultural program in Cuba,
• Wetland restoration program in the Everglades in South Florida,
• Managing mangrove coastal areas in the Caribbean,
• Developing a management plan for saving coral reefs in Phillipines,
• Regenerating forest lands through community action in Orissa, India,
• Reclaiming a watershed area in South Africa through an innovative program called Working for Water by clearing nonnative waterabsorbing plant species,
• Other water resource and grassland projects in different regions of the world, such as the Mekong River delta region, the New York State water reservoir system, and in the steppes of Mongolia.
Make no mistake about it, the solution-based approach for creating an environmentally sustainable future is not a technological fix. It is principally a state of mind, one that depends on broadening our horizons, for seeking innovative approaches, for looking at optimal, win-win solutions, for bringing all elements of the human community to work together, for listening to the young and those who are still young at heart, and above all for not despairing but being hopeful for our future.