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geekerati
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 Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:47 am Post subject: China and India 'hold the world in balance' |
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China and India 'hold the world in balance'
| Quote: | Development giants China and India “hold the world in balance”, says a new report by a US environmental think tank.
“The choices these two countries make in the next few years will lead the world either towards growing ecological and political instability – or down a development path based on efficiency and better stewardship of resources,” says a report from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, US.
One in every two tonnes of cement poured today will be in China – such is the country’s breakneck pace of economic development. The country also uses one-quarter of all the world’s steel, eats one-third of the world’s rice, and is the world’s largest importer of tropical timber and second largest importer of oil.
As well as using ever more resources, the two countries are also creating an increasing proportion of the world’s pollution. China, which gets two-thirds of its energy from coal, is now the second largest source of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, while India is fourth, says Worldwatch’s State of the World 2006 report.
Head count
The two countries argue that while they are high in the league tables of environmental damage, this is only because of their huge populations – their citizens, per head, cause only a fraction of the environmental damage of individual Europeans or North Americans.
Worldwatch agrees with this, estimating the worldwide “ecological footprint” – the amount of resources needed to support each individual – of the average Chinese person at 1.6 hectares, the average Indian at 0.8 hectares. The average US citizen's ecological footprint is estimated at a whopping 9.7 hectares.
Nonetheless, veteran US ecologist and China-watcher Lester Brown last week warned that if China’s economy continues to grow at the present rate, average Chinese incomes will reach current US levels by 2031. At that point “China would consume two-thirds of the world’s current grain harvest and twice the world’s current paper production”. |
Read more from New Scientist
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