From Resource Scarcity to Ecological Security: Exploring New Limits to Growth

Front Cover
Dennis Pirages, Ken Cousins
MIT Press, 2005 - 268 pages

From Resource Scarcity to Ecological Security revisits the findings of The Global 2000 Report to the President -- commissioned by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 -- and presents an up-to-date overview, informed by the earlier projections, of such critical topics as population, water, food, energy, climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity. It examines current environmental trends in order to consider the state of the global environment over the next thirty years and discusses what can be done now to achieve ecological security.

The authors of From Resource Scarcity to Ecological Security find that the world population will likely continue to level off, but the population decline in many industrialized countries will create new socioeconomic and political problems -- including the "reverse demographic shock" of disproportionately large aging populations. Although world food production is likely to increase at a rate that keeps up with population growth, greater demand in China as well as distributional issues will keep significant numbers of people malnourished. In addition to these continuing scarcity issues, ecological insecurity may increase because of new threats that include global warming, loss of biodiversity, bioinvasion, and the rapid worldwide growth of new diseases. The book not only analyzes the nature of these impending problems but suggests ways to solve them.

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Contents

From Limits to Growth to Ecological Security
1
The Future Is Not What It Used to Be World Population Trends
21
Reflections on an Aging Global Population
39
Global Water Prospects
59
Food Policy Underfed or Overfed?
83
Energy Security and Cooperation over the Next Quarter Century
105
RenewableEnergy Technologies
127
Future Socioeconomic and Political Challenges of Global Climate Change
145
Global Climate Change Policy Challenges Policy Responses
165
Forest Degradation the Timber Trade and Tropical Region Plantations
187
Biodiversity and Ecological Security
203
TwentyNine Days Responding to a Finite World
217
References
227
Contributors
257
Index
261
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Page 251 - Agenda 21 and the non-legally binding authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of all Types of Forests were adopted.

About the author (2005)

Dennis Pirages is Dean's Professor of Government and PSC Graduate Coordinator. He is the author or editor of many books on political and environmental issues and contributed to The Global 2000 Report to the President. Ken Cousins is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland.

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