Most current estimates suggest that 2 billion people will be added to the world's population over the next 30 years and another billion in the following 20 years.¹ Virtually all of this increase will be in developing countries, the bulk of it in urban areas. In these same countries, 2.5 billion to 3 billion people now live on less than $2 a day.² The core challenge for development is to ensure productive work and a better quality of life for all these people. This will require substantial growth in productivity and incomes in developing countries.

The challenge may seem daunting-and it is. But over the past 30 years world population also rose by 2 billion.³ And this growth was accompanied by considerable progress in improving human well-being, as measured by human development indicators. Average income per capita (population-weighted in 1995 dollars) in developing countries grew from $989 in 1980 to $1,354 in 2000.⁴ Infant mortality was cut in half, from 107 per 1,000 live births to 58, as was adult illiteracy, from 47 to 25 percent.⁵

Looking back to the 1950s and 1960s, it was feared at the time that the developing countries -particularly China, India, and Indonesia- would not be able to feed their rapidly growing populations. Thanks to the green revolution in agriculture, the doomsday scenarios of famine and starvation did not materialize in these, the most populous, developing countries. In the 1960s and 1970s the Club of Rome and many other groups forecast that the Earth would rapidly run out of key natural resources. So far, this has not happened, again because changes in technology and in preferences have allowed the substitution of new resources for existing ones-for example, fiber optics in place of copper. Global action has also led to major strides in eliminating disease scourges (smallpox and river blindness), and in addressing new problems (ozone depletion).

But accompanying these achievements were some negative social and environmental patterns that must not be repeated in the next 50 years if development is to be sustained.

Poverty: declining, but still a challenge. There has been a significant drop in the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (that is, living on less than $1 per day). Even the absolute number of very poor people declined between 1980 and 1998 by at least 200 million, to almost 1.2 billion in 1998.⁶ The decrease was primarily due to the decline in the number of very poor people in China as a result of its strong growth from 1980 onward.⁷ Since 1993, there have also been encouraging signs of renewed poverty reduction in India. Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, has seen its number of very poor people increase steadily. Yet in 1998, despite the decline in Asia and the increase in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and South Asia still accounted for two-thirds of the world's very poor people, and Sub-Saharan Africa for one-quarter. Development strategies will need to do better in eliminating abject poverty. The estimated 1 billion very poor people is of the same order of magnitude as the independently generated figures on the number of people who are undernourished and underweight. ⁸

Inequality: widening. The average income in the richest 20 countries is now 37 times that in the poorest 20. This ratio has doubled in the past 40 years, mainly because of lack of growth in the poorest countries. ⁹ Similar increases in inequality are found within many (but not all) countries.

Conflict: devastating. In the 1990s, 46 countries were involved in conflict, primarily civil. ¹⁰ This included more than half of the poorest countries (17 out of 33). These conflicts have very high costs, destroying past development gains and leaving a legacy of damaged assets and mistrust that impedes future gains.

The increased scale and reach of human activity have also put great pressure on local and global common property resources (water, soil, and fisheries), as well as on local and global sinks (the ability of the biosphere to absorb waste and regulate climate).

Air: polluted. At the local level, hundreds of developing-country cities have unhealthy levels of air pollution (see chapter 3, figure 3.4). At the global level, the biosphere's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without altering temperatures has been compromised because of heavy reliance on fossil fuels for energy. Global energy use traditionally has grown at the same rate as gross domestic product (GDP). Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will continue to grow unless a concerted effort is made to increase energy efficiency and move away from today's heavy reliance on fossil fuels. ¹¹ In the past 50 years excess nitrogen-mainly from fertilizers, human sewage, and combustion of fossil fuels-has begun to overwhelm the global nitrogen cycle, giving rise to a variety of ill effects ranging from reduced soil fertility to excess nutrients in lakes, rivers, and coastal waters. On current trends, the amount of biologically available nitrogen will double in 25 years.¹²

Fresh water: increasingly scarce. Fresh water consumption is rising quickly, and the availability of water in some regions is likely to become one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. One-third of the world's people live in countries that are already experiencing moderate to high water shortages. That proportion could (at current population forecasts) rise to half or more in the next 30 years unless institutions change to ensure better conservation and allocation of water.¹³ More than a billion people in low- and middle-income countries-and 50 million people in high-income countries-lacked access to safe water for drinking, personal hygiene, and domestic use in 1995.¹⁴

Soil: being degraded. Nearly 2 million hectares of land worldwide (23 percent of all cropland, pasture, forest, and woodland) have been degraded since the 1950s. About 39 percent of these lands are lightly degraded, 46 percent moderately degraded, and 16 percent so severely degraded that the change is too costly to reverse. Some areas face sharp losses in productivity. Grasslands do not fare much better: close to 54 percent show degradation, with 5 percent being strongly degraded.¹⁵

Forests: being destroyed. Deforestation is proceeding at a significant rate. One-fifth of all tropical forests have been cleared since 1960.¹⁶ According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), deforestation has been concentrated in the developing world, which lost nearly 200 million hectares between 1980 and 1995. In the Brazilian Amazon annual deforestation rates varied between 11,000 and 29,000 square kilometers a year in the 1990s. Deforestation in developing countries has several causes, including the conversion of forests to large-scale ranching and plantations and the expansion of subsistence farming. At the same time, forest cover in industrial countries is stable or even increasing slightly, although the forest ecosystem has been somewhat altered. According to a 1997 World Resources Institute (WRI) assessment, just one-fifth of the Earth's original forest remains in large, relatively natural ecosystems.¹⁷

Biodiversity: disappearing. Through a series of local extinctions, the ranges of many plants and animals have been reduced from those at the beginning of the century. In addition, many plants and animals are unique to certain areas. One-third of terrestrial biodiversity, accounting for 1.4 percent of the Earth's surface, is in vulnerable "hot spots" and is threatened with complete loss in the event of natural disasters or further human encroachment.¹⁸ Some statistics suggest that 20 percent of all endangered species are threatened by species introduced by human activity and alien to the locality .¹⁹

Fisheries: declining. The aquatic environment and its productivity are on the decline. About 58 percent of the world's coral reefs and 34 percent of all fish species are at risk from human activities.²⁰ Seventy percent of the world's commercial fisheries are fully exploited or overexploited and experiencing declining yields.²¹

None of these social and environmental patterns is consistent with sustained growth in an interdependent world over the long term. Given the social and environmental stresses caused by past development strategies, the goal of raising human well-being worldwide must be pursued through a development process that "does better"-a poverty-eliminating growth path that integrates social and environmental concerns in pursuit of the goal of sustained improvements in well-being.