06/05/2001 0:59 am ET

New U.N. report profiles urbanizing world

The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS (AP) Almost half the world's people now live in cities, a new United Nations report reveals, where they are plugged into a rapidly growing global economic web. Yet this urban prosperity machine can be brutal. More than 1 billion people live in slums and squatter communities worldwide. Jobs can be difficult to come by, especially in the fast-growing cities in Africa and Latin America. Pollution from cars, factories and sewage threatens public health.

The U.N. State of the World's Cities report, released Monday, comes five years into an initiative aimed at addressing those problems. At a 1996 meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, more than 170 nations agreed to the common goals of building sustainable settlements and providing adequate shelter for all.

"It sounds straightforward but it has proved to be very elusive," said Anna Kajumulo Tabaijuka, executive director of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements.

At a second meeting in New York this week, dubbed Habitat II, the parties to that agreement will gather to assess their progress and offer solutions. They will be joined on June 6-8 by more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations and hundreds of mayors.

"It is a stock-taking exercise," Tabaijuka said.

Much of the meeting will be devoted to sharing experiences and advice. Delegates from Africa will describe improvements in the water supply for cities such as Nairobi, Kenya, and Lagos, Nigeria, where more than 60 percent of the population has no running water. Canadian representatives will give advice on how to make cities safer from crime and natural disaster. Officials from Nigeria will share the experience of governing unruly Lagos, population 13.4 million, and other rapidly growing cities.

By 2030, the world's urban population will rival its total population just a few years ago.

By 2010, 21 of the world's cities will have populations of 10 million or more, with people flocking from the countryside to cities such as Sao Paulo, Brazil. The emergence of these "supercities," most of them in the developing world, presents enormous challenges.

In this decade the population of Dhaka, Bangladesh, is expected to nearly triple to 18.4 million from its 1990 population of 6.6 million.

While the developing world struggles with providing housing, employment and basic services to booming cities, industrialized countries try to decrease consumption in theirs. The world uses five times as much fossil fuel and twice as much fresh water as it did in the middle of the 20th centuries. At those rates of increase, those resources could be gone by the end of the 21st century.

"A child born in the industrialized world consumes and pollutes more in its lifetime than do 30 - 50 children in developing countries; yet the environmental damage from global consumption falls most heavily on the poor," the U.N. report states.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20010605_91.html

-- Carl Jenkins (smewherepress@aol.com), June 05, 2001

Answers

"A child born in the industrialized world consumes and pollutes more in its lifetime than do 30 - 50 children in developing countries; yet the environmental damage from global consumption falls most heavily on the poor," the U.N. report states.

This is a profound statistic ::::-§

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), June 05, 2001.

People living in the U. S. pollute and use more resources than people living in any other country in the world. Ninety percent of the population growth of our country in this century will be a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act. Current U.S. mass immigration policy is globally irresponsible.

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), June 06, 2001.