Governments? Pah!

摘要

Forget about governments fixing ecosystems and climate, a panel of leading environmental scientists declared last week. "The political system is broken," said Bob Watson, chief environmental science adviser to the UK government. The panel, all winners of the Blue Planet prize, often seen as the environmental-science Nobel, were meeting in London to prepare a statement for the 2012 Earth Summit, to be held in June in Rio de Janeiro - 20 years after the original Earth Summit there. They said the world had wasted the intervening years. Ecosystems are disappearing ever faster, the world is still warming, and two treaties, on climate change and species loss, have failed to achieve their aims.