Urban dwellers are mainly responsible for global warming, but see little of the effects because they have their biggest impact in isolated and sparsely populated regions, the U.N. environment agency said.
GENEVA — Urban dwellers are mainly responsible for global warming, but see little of the effects because they have their biggest impact in isolated and sparsely populated regions, the U.N. environment agency said.
"Cities use vast amounts of resources like water, food and timber while also producing a large amount of waste," said Klaus Toepfer, head of the United Nations Environment Program, or UNEP.
"People living in San Francisco or London may look at these images of deforestation or melting Arctic ice, and wonder what it has to do with them," Toepfer said on Friday. "Their impacts stretch beyond their physical borders affecting countries, regions and the planet as a whole."
Toepfer made his remarks to commemorate the launch of a new atlas called "One Planet Many People," which compares and contrasts satellite images of past decades with present ones. The atlas is aimed at educating citizens, notably of industrialized countries, on how their lifestyle can destroy the environment.
"An image says more than a thousand words ... The atlas provides evidence of the changes we bring to our environment," said Pascal Peduzzi, an environmental scientist at UNEP.
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Using satellite images from the United States Geological Survey and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the pictures highlight dramatic changes around cities such as Beijing, Dhaka, Delhi and Santiago, the destruction of farmland, the clogging of river beds, the draining of water supplies and many others.
The atlas shows satellite images of Las Vegas, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the U.S., which had 24,000 inhabitants in the 1950s and where today's population of 1 million is expected to double by 2015. As a result, the water level of nearby Lake Meade has dropped by 18 meters (60 feet) from 2000 to 2003 as housing and irrigated golf courses replaced natural desert.
"The images are as awe-inspiring as those of the tsunami, although they don't occur from one day to the next," Peduzzi said, referring to the tsunami that devastated coastal areas of Asia in December.
Other images show the effects from the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain, rain forest deforestation or the rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin America.
But they also highlight effects from wars and diseases. For example, wars and Saddam Hussein's draining of marshlands in Iraq have contributed to the virtual destruction of the world's biggest date palm forest along the Shatt al'Arab in Iraq and Iran. Satellite images show that more than 14 million trees, or 80 percent of the trees that stood in 1970, are gone along with the livelihoods of millions of people.
The atlas was being launched simultaneously in San Francisco; Nairobi, Kenya; and London.
Source: Associated Press
