http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&
u=/nm/20031209/wl_nm/environment_australia_dc_2
Tue, Dec 09, 2003
Sydney Lifestyle Unsustainable, Report
Says
By Michael Perry
SYDNEY (Reuters) -
Sydney, Australia is regularly voted one
of the world's best cities to live in, but a new environment
report has warned its affluent lifestyle is ecologically
unsustainable. The 2003 environment report on the Australian
state of New South Wales (NSW) says Sydney residents are
wasting millions of gallons of water, demanding ever more
electricity and remain car obsessed, increasing greenhouse
gas emissions.
"As a society,
we need to face up to the reality that our
environment and its resources are finite," NSW Environment
Minister Bob Debus said in a statement attached to the report.
"If we want to
keep our quality of life and leave the environment
in a better or even the same state than it is now, we need to
heed
the wake-up call," said Debus.
Sydney, the state capital,
is Australia's most populous city with
some four million residents. The ecological footprint needed to
sustain each resident has increased by 16 percent in the past
five years, said the NSW Environment Protection Agency report.
According to the latest
statistics, it takes 7.4 hectares
(18 acres) of land to provide the range of goods and services
consumed by each resident each year, said the report, received
Tuesday.
"Continuing the
current path of resource use will have serious
environmental and economic consequences for NSW. There is
unsustainable use of ground and surface water, energy, soils,
native vegetation and fish," said the report.
The city is already
under water restrictions as Australia
suffers the worst drought in a century. Water capacity at
dams around Sydney are near record lows.
One of the major problems
facing Sydney is simply it is too
popular -- it is being loved to death.
Sydney and its satellite
towns are experiencing the strongest
population growth since the 1960s, with 50,000 new residents
each year, or the equivalent of a large country town.
The NSW population
is expected to rise by one million to
7.6 million by 2026, with many people opting for Sydney
as home.
The report found that
as Sydney's population grows so too
is the demand for more electricity, forecasting the need
for a 25 percent increase in electricity generation in the
next 10 years at a cost of A$8.0 billion (US$5.7 billion).
It said such an increase
would see greenhouse gas emissions
rise sharply as coal-fired generators remained the most popular
source of electricity in Australia.
But it is Sydney's
love affair with the car that is arguably
the biggest environmental problem facing the city.
Transport is the third
largest source of greenhouse gases in
Australia, contributing 14.3 percent to emissions nationally,
and it is the fastest growing emission sector. Greenhouse
gas emissions from cars are expected to rise by 40 percent
by 2010.
In the past 10 years,
the number and length of trips taken
by cars in NSW, with the bulk in Sydney, has increased
by more than 25 percent, more than twice the rate of
population growth. In 2000, Sydney residents made
15 million trips on an average weekday, with each
journey averaging 10 miles. ($1=A$1.39)
###
