Ecosystems on edge of irreversible collapse

Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century.

This is the considered opinion of 1 300 leading scientists from 95 countries who on Wednesday released a detailed assessment of the current state of the world.

The academics found that two thirds of the delicately balanced ecosystems they studied have suffered badly at the hands of man over the past 50 years.

The dryland regions of the world, which account for about 41 percent of the Earth's land surface, have been particularly badly damaged and yet this is where the human population has grown most rapidly during the 1990s.

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