This might well have disastrous consequences - unless the economic development and management of the Earth's raw materials is placed on a sustainable basis. The past few decades have seen a growing awareness that the Earth is a single living whole, and that what happens in one place can have major consequences on the other side of the globe. El Niño and the greenhouse effect illustrate this beautifully.
Authorities throughout world are beginning to understand this,
and have therefore concluded a number of international treaties
and conventions, such as the Climate
Treaty, the Kyoto
Protocol for reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses,
the Vienna
Convention for protecting the ozone layer, the UN
Convention on biological diversity, etc.
.But it is equally striking that international financial institutions
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are
increasingly making financial aid to developing economies dependent
on the adoption of a sustainable development policy.
Satellites are the ideal - indeed, often the only - instrument
for studying world-wide processes, interactions between oceans,
continents and the atmosphere, monitoring changes over vast
regions, and acquiring new insights into how everything fits
together. They are used to monitor vegetation, map land-use
changes, measure ozone concentrations, monitor the temperature
of the oceans, etc.
As such, they offer policymakers information necessary for making
the right decisions for a sustainable development of our planet.