考研阅读精选：100亿人口会耗尽地球资源吗？
『世界人口的迅速增长，让地球资源的可持续利用一度成为各大媒介讨论的热点问题。到本世纪末，人类人口将达到100亿，到那时，地球还能承受起养育人类的重任吗？』Will 10 Billion People Use Up the Planet’s Resources?
100亿人口会耗尽地球资源吗？
May 25th, 2011 | From Scientific American
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The human enterprise now consumes nearly 60 billion metric tons ofminerals, ores, fossil fuels and plant materials, such as crop plantsand trees for timber or paper. Meanwhile, the seven billionth person onthe planet is expected to be born this year—and the human population mayreach 10 billion by this century’s end, according to the latest UnitedNations analysis. Hundreds of millions of people in Europe, NorthAmerica and Asia live a modern life, which largely means consuming morethan 16 metric tons of such natural resources—or more—per person peryear. If the billions of poor people living today or born tomorrowconsume anything approaching this figure, the world will have to findmore than 140 billion metric tons of such materials each year bymid-century, according to a new report from the U.N. EnviromentalProgramme.
Figuring out how to do more with less is becoming a global necessity.
The good news is that economic prosperity has been rising faster thandirect resource consumption. Between 1980 and 2002, the resourcesrequired to produce $1,000 worth of consumer goods fell from 2.1 metrictons to just 1.6 metric tons and global per capita income has increasedseven-fold. The bad news is that trend will not necessarily continueand—in absolute terms—resource consumption has increased 10-fold since1900.
Of course, a wide array of national governments andeven the international community have committed to "sustainabledevelopment," variously defined but essentially attempts to reducethings like energy use or resource extraction that go along witheconomic growth. Those lofty goals, however, do not match up to facts onthe ground.
The U.N., for its part, plans to launch aneffort similar to the Millennium Development Goals to curb resourcewaste, greenhouse gas emissions and the like, and Swiss scientists havecome up with a plan for a "2,000 watt" per person society, which aimsfor reducing each European’s energy use by roughly one third.
But that type of approach, in order to be effective, would need topaired with a mindset no longer driven by gadget lust. After all,technological leapfrogging, such as from burning wood for light and heatto lighting a bulb with electricity from photovoltaic panels requires ashift from consumption of biomass to consumption of minerals, whichdiffer only in the type of impact on the planet. Nor is it clear that"decoupling"—rising economic growth paired with reductions in resourceconsumption—actually is now taking place; most gains to date, such asthose in Germany or Japan, may simply have been achieved by outsourcingresource-intensive manufacturing.
High prices forcommodities, in and of themselves, will drive more efficient use of suchresources, but that may not be enough to prevent the total depletion ofworld’s resources and attendant environmental apocalypse, according tothe new UNEP report. Ultimately, the quantity of resources consumed bythe nearly 7 billion of us on the planet will need to average out to sixmetric tons per year per person—a steep cut in the resources currentlyenjoyed by people in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.S. As itstands now, an average American uses 88 kilograms of stuff per day and,all told, our modern gadgets require at least 60 different elements,ranging from the toxic to the treasured, such as gold. These devicesfuel the same kind of exploitative and annihilating resource-extractionthat has been a hallmark of consumption since at least the ivory crazeof Victorian England or the relentless pursuit of whale oil in the 19thcentury and earlier.
"People believe environmental ‘bads’are the price we must pay for economic ‘goods,’" said UNEP ExecutiveDirector Achim Steiner in releasing the report on May 12 and calling foran increased effort to decouple economic growth and resourceconsumption. "However, we cannot, and need not, continue to act as ifthis trade-off is inevitable." (652 words)
文章地址：http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/05/25/will-10-billion-people-use-up-the-planets-resources/
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