Issue 12: October - November 2001

In Global Environmental Risk, a new book from UN University Press, researchers rank the relative threat posed by a host of environmental problems in different countries in an effort to help policy makers develop priorities for action to protect the planet.

Criteria included the human health consequences, the pervasiveness of those consequences, the potential disruption caused and human manageability of the problem.  The resulting matrix provided a ranking of environmental problems facing four countries chosen for study: the United States, India, Kenya and The Netherlands.

Using data from 1988 to 1991, climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion were deemed the foremost threat to the U.S. in terms of total future consequences, followed by degradation of the oceans and freshwaters.

Vicki Norberg-Bohm, a Harvard University researcher and project director, says the effort takes an innovative approach to creating a transparent ranking system that looks at all environmental hazards and at all potential effects, one that can be used by many decision-makers to add their own values.

The study cites a pressing need for systematic understanding of how the severity and nature of environmental problems vary around the world. 

“An increasing number of environmental problems compete for places on political agendas, for the attention of regulatory agencies and international governmental bodies, and for the limited resources available for environmental management. . .This need can only become more pressing as bilateral and international negotiations increasingly take on environmental dimensions.

“Resource allocation sporadically tracks successive ‘problems of the month,’ responding more to media attention and political grandstanding than to any more fundamental criteria.”

In their introduction, the book’s editors Jeanne and Roger Kasperson warn that the short and long-term consequences of continuing degradation of soils, groundwater and the air may be worse than such current global concerns as climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss.

Response to looming environmental threats will require improving human understanding of the processes of change, recognizing and learning from history, criticizing and restructuring the economic and political order, new institutions, and a wider, more enduring sense of environmental citizenship and reciprocity with nature.  

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