Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 6 • Number 1 • 20th January 2006

State of the World Report 2006 Puts Spotlight on China and India

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The impact of China and India as major consumers of resources and polluters of local and global ecosystems form the focus of the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World Report 2005. While the threats stemming from the dramatic economic rise of the two countries to the survival of the planet are laid out in detail, the report also highlights innovative and progressive developments in the two economies such as recent commitments to develop large wind power and solar energy industries, South-South sharing of ideas and the development of independent environmental NGOs in China. Accordingly, the report views this colossal shift in global geopolitics as an opportunity rather than a threat and calls for broader cooperation to develop new energy and agricultural systems between China, India, Europe and the US who together claim 75 percent of the Earth’s “biocapacity”, i.e. its bioproductive supply of natural resources. Notably, influential Chinese and Indians themselves call for a new path of industrialisation based on technology, low consumption of resources and low environmental pollution. As Sunita Narain of India’s Centre for Science and Environment notes in the foreword to the report, “the South - India, China, and all their neighbours - has no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory”.

The full report can be accessed at http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/sow/2006/toc/

“State of the World 2006: China and India Hold World in Balance,” WORLDWATCH PRESS RELEASE, 11 January 2006.