Alarm bells ringing

Press, 15 October 1976, Page 5

Alarm bells ringing

By PAUL MAJENDIE, NZPA-Reuter correspondent Paris The world must watch out: man is mismanaging both land and sea, and within a decade, may well have done vastly-expensive damage to the environment. This doomwatch warning comes from a man who should know and has a global grasp of all the worst pollution problems: the head of the United Nations Environment Programme. Dr Mostafa Tolba, an Egyptian microbiologist. Dr Tolba said in Paris: “I am not a pessimist by nature, and I don’t want to sound an alarmist, but time is short. Unless we do something, and do it quickly, to stop further degradation, it will be very costly to meet the requirements of the next 10 years.” A scientist who speaks concisely and deliberately, Dr Tolba then sounded four alarm bells, on chemicals, the seas, the ozone layer, and soil erosion, which, he said, the world should sit up and listen to.

The Seveso plant disaster in Italy had highlighted chemical dangers, and Dr Tolba noted, “more than 1000 new chemicals are being thrown on to the market every year.

“It is often impossible to gauge what effect the mixture of two chemicals on

humans, animals, and plants hr.:,” he said. “Do we really know what is a safe limit to exposure over 20 years? “This issue requires us to be very careful with safety standards and very stringent regulations must be laid down by governments to ensure that we are not stepping into the unknown."

The picture Dr Tolba paints of the world’s seas is a depressing one and a marine rescue operation is clearly high on the United Nations body’s list of priorities. Dr Tolba said: “The Mediterranean is a sick sea, but it is not dead. The Gulf is in a miserable state with all the pollution by oil and minerals from the oilproducing countries. The Red Sea is in the same state. The Caribbean faces simililar problems, as do the west Coast of Africa and the Malacca Straits.

“We want to halt the process of deterioration, and to ensure that countries around these regional seas continue to develop without causing any damage to the sea and its environment.” In the case of the ozone layer, the thin and fragile strip that surrounds the earth’s atmosphere, Dr Tolba cites two potential problems. “With the Concorde supersonic airliner’s present and planned flying heights, there is no critical risk to the ozone layer, but if they in-

crease the height of flying, then there could be serious damage,” he said.

“Nitrogen fertilisers may also be harmful to the ozone layer, highlighting the dilemma between the desire to produce more food and the problem of unbalancing the atmosphere.” To Dr Tolba, soil loss is a problem which he would put at least on a par with the damage from industrial pollutants. “The developing world,” he said, “is losing land by overworking it. Wind and water takeover, and then it is eroded.”

“Concrete examples are the tropical forests felled for e<xsily-available energy resources, and the tendency of nomads and villagers to overgraze on fragile vegetation. That, in the latest scientific jargon, produces ‘desertification’.”

Summing up the United Nations programmes role “as a kind of twenty-first-century prophet” Dr Tolba said: ‘ We consider ourselves the only United Nations organisation that is concerned mainly with the future. We feel that if we take the proper decisions today, then humanity will be saved from many problems. Our responsibility is to ring alarm bells for the future. Governments must co-operate, and environmental conventions must be ratified.”