Barcelona Declaration 2008: Challenges and Pathways to Earth Sust...( The Centre for Ecological Research a...)

The Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), in the celebration of its 20th anniversary, organised a meeting whit a group of international experts to discuss the environmental future of the planet on the 2 and 3 of October. The work of both days is summarized in the Declaration of Barcelona 2008: Challenges and Pathways to Earth Sustainability, which you will find bellow. Targeted to governments and to business agents from all over the world, this document claims the immediate adoption of measures to mitigate the global change and a scientific and technological revolution to advance towards a coherent sustainable development.

The coming three decades will determine whether the population of the world comes into balance with the capacity of the biosphere to support it, or whether catastrophic changes in the environment brought on by climate change, losses of biodiversity, pollution of air and water, and overharvesting of natural resources will lead to the end of the improvement of wellbeing that has characterized the Modern Era.

Current indicators are alarming. Declining trends in environmental conditions either continue unchanged from previous decades or are accelerating beyond our worst projections. There is growing evidence that irreversible changes have already occurred or are imminent.

The deterioration of the global environment continues despite current international efforts, including adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and treaties to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. Clearly, global action to reverse the negative trends is inadequate, but it is not too late to collectively create a viable future. The scale, urgency and severity of the problems means that no action is too small to matter, too large to contemplate, or too soon to begin.

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