Last Gasp: by Jonathon Porritt

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A boat stranded as the Aral sea dries up

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Jonathon Porritt offers his opinion on the prospects for the environment

We'd never get that far of course - feedback from collapsing natural systems would be so severe that we would be forced into emergency "coping strategies" long before the crunch - but at what cost then, so late in the day, to our economies, and to our democracies?

This is just one of a battery of curtain-raising reports that were published in the run-up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Nothing new there. Big international events of this kind are always preceded by apocalyptic warnings of bad times ahead.

Not so long ago, however, these warnings inspired heated rebuttals from governments, often accompanied by crude attempts to disparage the scientific credentials of those offering the warnings. These days, all we get is silence. Hands-off, stony-faced, heard-it-all-before silence.

The truth is they can't rebut these warnings. The data used in reports like that of the WWF come not from "flaky, politically-motivated NGOs", but from the UN, international agencies, government-funded research programmes, and academic experts. Year on year, the data gets stronger and stronger. For lack of an even halfway adequate response, politicians keep their mouths shut.

And therein lies the real problem. Whatever our politicians may say about the importance of "evidence-based policy-making", of putting science at the heart of efforts to build a more sustainable, equitable world, their silence is in effect a betrayal of science.

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Content last updated: 18/08/2004