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 Human activity is polluting water in the oceans, rivers, aquifers and lakes. More than 97 per cent of all the water on Earth is seawater. During the UNESCO proclaimed International Year of the Ocean in 1998 it emerged that the oceans are being over-fished and polluted at an unprecedented rate. Important areas of the oceans close to the continental shelf are contaminated with human, agricultural, industrial and radioactive waste. Much of this is toxic and carcinogenic. Because we have tended to treat the oceans as sewers the Baltic, Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, Bering, Yellow and South China Sea have all been seriously damaged in recent decades. The waters of the Black Sea, once a flourishing eco-system, are now considered to be 90 per cent dead. The Aral Sea has diminished by one-third and what remains is heavily polluted.
Over-fishing is depleting the oceans and leaving them barren. It is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Many people feel that the oceans are so vast and the variety of fish so abundant that there would always be vast quantities of fish in the sea. We are now learning how false those assumptions are. According to a report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in 1995 over 70 per cent of the world's marine fish stocks are either "fully-to-heavily exploited, overexploited, or slowly recovering".
 Only one per cent of the fresh water of the world is available for human use in either agriculture, industry or for domestic purposes. Worldwide demand for water is doubling every 21 years and access to this water is very inequitable. Supply cannot keep pace with demand as populations soar and cities explode. The situation in the Middle East and North Africa is precarious. North East China, Western and Southern India, Pakistan, much of South America and Central American countries like Mexico face water scarcity.
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, CFCs and other "greenhouse" gases are expected to increase by 30 percent during the next 50 years. This build-up is likely to increase the Earth's surface temperature by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees centigrade by the year 2030. This will cause major, and in the main, deleterious climatic changes. The changes will have major, but as yet unpredictable, effects on agriculture and natural eco-systems. As the oceans warm up and expand, sea levels will rise, leading to severe flooding over lowland areas like Bangladesh. Storms of great ferocity like hurricane Mitch that slammed into Central America in October 1998 will probably become more frequent.
 One could continue to pile depressing data on data, but the data presented above gives us a valid framework with which to begin to appreciate what is happening to our planet. Human industrial activity is changing the chemistry of the air and water, altering the hydrological cycles and upsetting the entire self-renewing pattern of nature that has taken billions of years to emerge. Only now are we beginning to wake up to the consequence of our activity. It is now threatening the very survival of many of the earth's creatures, including human beings. We can only turn back the tide by pursuing fundamentally different policies across a wide range of human activities.
Published on 09th
May 2002
(Based on Net resources)
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