WWF Provides Presidential Candidates with Environmental Roadmap
If everyone on Earth consumed its resources at the rate Americans do, we would need the regenerative capacity of three planets just to keep up with the demand.
That’s what the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) say in their Greenprint document that they have handed to presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.
The Greenprint - entitled Leading the World Toward a Safer and Sustainable Future: Greenprint For A New Administration - is a roadmap document that outlines how the next administration should deal with environmental issues.
The greenprint, which was made publicly available on Wednesday, emphasizes the importance of looking after our natural environment:
Half the world still lives on less than $2 per day and does so only by subsisting on natural resources provided by the environment—an environment already stressed by unsustainable development, climate change and pollution.
The report also says this about global consumption:
Global consumption of natural resources currently exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by nearly 25 percent and is expected to increase threefold by the middle of the century as our numbers and demands grow
The document covers four key areas that the future president should address:
- Climate change
- Conservation of natural resources
- Food security
- Freshwater availability
Here’s a quick run down on what the greenprint recommends in those areas.
Climate Change
The WWF greenprint recommends that the next administration:
- play a constructive role in international negotiations on a new climate treaty
- curb deforestation (which accounts for nearly 20 percent of global annual greenhouse gas emissions)
- propose domestic legislation to establish a cap and trade program for greenhouse gases
- develop a preparedness strategy for confronting the impacts of climate change
Conservation of Natural Resources
The document recommends:
- to restructure America’s Cold War-era foreign assistance programs to better integrate conservation and sustainability into the framework
- renewed investment in natural assets
- a stronger engagement with China (WWF point out that China is developing at a rate that is stressing the world’s natural resource capacity)
Food Security
On food security, the greenprint recommends:
- development of performance-based standards for biofuels to ensure fuel supplies don’t diminish food supplies
- an overhaul of management policies to restore the health of the world’s declining fisheries (WWF also point out that this is a primary source of protein for more than 1 billion of the world’s poor).
Freshwater Availability
The greenprint recommends that the government:
- make freshwater availability a strategic priority for the U.S.
- lay the scientific and policy groundwork for global water security.
The Full Greenprint Document
You can read the full Greenprint document here (PDF document).
Tags: Climate Change, Global Warming, natural environment, water
Related Posts:
- None Found
