In the time it takes you to get to the end of this sentence, seven people have been added to the population of the world. At this rate, the United Nations estimates the number of people on the planet will nearly double by the middle of this century. Even with significant reductions in birth rates, the population is expected to increase from 6.7 billion now to 9.2 billion by 2050.

These figures are staggering. Yet there was hardly a mention of them in a major story last week: the announcement by Britain's two main political parties of how they will tackle what is commonly agreed to be the biggest threat facing the planet, global warming and ensuing climate change.

Put simply, if governments want to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent, and the world's population rises to the mid-range forecast of 9.2 billion, each person would in fact have to slash their emissions by 72 per cent. More efficient technology, renewable energy and lifestyle changes will help do that, but growing prosperity and consumption in developing countries will also make it harder. That all our low-energy light bulbs, home insulation, efficient cars, boilers and washing machines have so far failed to stop emissions growing illustrates how difficult cutting them will be to achieve.

Some population activists argue the world can only support a population of two to three billion, even as few as 500 million in future. But even if reducing the world's population is unlikely or distasteful, it is incredible that there is not even a debate about limiting and maybe one day reversing growth. There are many understandable reasons for the prevailing reluctance to talk about population.

Buildings consume 40 percent of our energy and can have life spans longer than humans. Because we live, work and associate with others in buildings, they form part of the fabric of human life—and thus have an enormous effect not only on the quality of individual lives but also on the state of the earth.

In the pages that follow, we have configured a structure that is not just kind to nature; it actually imitates nature. Imagine a building that makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy, changes with the seasons—and is beautiful. In effect, that building is like a tree, standing in a city that is like a forest.

In an analysis of scientific data going back to the 1960s and historical records over a thousand years, the researchers found that marine biodiversity -- the variety of ocean fish, shellfish, birds, plants and micro-organisms -- has declined dramatically, with 29 percent of species already in collapse.

Extending this pattern into the future, the scientists calculated that by 2048 all species would be in collapse, which the researchers defined as having catches decline 90 percent from the maximum catch.

This applies to all species, from mussels and clams to tuna and swordfish, said Boris Worm, lead author of the study, which was published in the current edition of the journal Science.

Ocean mammals, including seals, killer whales and dolphins, are also affected.

"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging," Worm said in a statement. "In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected."

The report sounds a specific warning for the honeybee, which are vital to U.S. agriculture, pollinating more than 90 commercially grown crops. It can take a massive amount of bees to ensure a crop is suitably pollinated.

For example, it takes about 1.4 million colonies of honeybees to pollinate 550,000 acres of almond trees in California.

U.S. honeybee populations have declined at least 30 percent since the 1980s, when a non-native parasitic mite was introduced.

The committee said that the full extent of the decline is unclear because of problems with the way the federal government collects statistics on the beekeeping industry.

Antibiotic-resistant pathogens and encroachment by Africanized honeybees also are hurting North American honeybee levels, the committee said, and there is clear evidence of a honeybee shortage.

In an area that is characterized mostly by desert, the trees have preserved an ecological niche because they exploit a wispy-thin source of water that only occurs seasonally, said Elfatih A.B. Eltahir, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and former MIT graduate student Anke Hildebrandt.

After studying the Oman site, they also expressed concern that the unusual forest could be driven into extinction if hungry camels continue eating too much of the foliage. As the greenery disappears it's possible the trees will lose the ability to pull water from the mist and recharge underground reservoirs.

A report on their research was published in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. They are also advising the Omani government on handling the problem.

The forest is especially unique, said Eltahir and Hildebrandt, because it "is a water-limited seasonal cloud forest" that is kept alive by water droplets gathered from passing clouds -- ground fog. The water dribbles into the ground and sustains the trees later when the weather is dry. The MIT work suggests the trees actually get more of their water through contact with clouds than via rainfall.

All around the world amphibians - frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and the like - are facing extinction by a rapidly spreading fungus that's being made even more deadly by pollution and overdevelopment, some of world's top scientists warned in research published Friday. At least 427 species are considered "critically endangered," with at least a third of all amphibians threatened. In the past 25 years, the scientists say, about 122 species have become extinct.

But the fungus, a unique species called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, could start taking on a larger role in the increasing extinction because of global warming, which scientists suspect is lowering amphibians' resistance to the disease.

The fungus was discovered in Australia and Panama only eight years ago and since then has spread across Europe and both the Americas, causing skin infections called chytrid disease in every amphibian species it attacks. The death rate from the infections is 100 percent, biologists have found. The disease, they concluded, "causes catastrophic mortality in amphibian populations, and subsequent extinctions."

According to the Marine Conservation Society's latest annual survey, which covers more than a hundred miles of British coastline, there has been a 90 per cent increase in the density of litter over the past decade. More than a third of the rubbish found in the latest survey consisted of fragments of plastic, food wrappers, bottle lids and cotton buds.

And it's not just Britain. The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating on every square mile of the world's oceans.

The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week the Los Angeles Times carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan.

Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of crisp packets chucked in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The Patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea.

From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Although Hansen will no longer have the mission statement to justify his research on global warming, on July 29, Griffin assured The New York Times that the change does not reduce NASA's commitment to Earth science. "The strategic plan states that one of our strategic goals is to "study Earth from space to advance scientific understanding and meet societal needs."

But skepticism remains. One scientist (who did not want to be named for fear of retribution from NASA) questioned the motivation behind this recent change. "It's really curious to see these changes coming during the Bush Administration — perhaps the most science-unfriendly administration in recent history. From having White House flunkies doctoring scientific reports on global warming, putting political 'minders' in charge of science communication, and slashing budgets for Earth and environmental science, you have to wonder if this is all politically driven."

SOMEONE SHOULD sit NASA's leaders down and have them read the part of the agency's mission statement that says NASA will work to "understand and protect our home planet." Budget cuts, commitments to the International Space Station, and President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon by 2020 have forced the cancellation or postponement of projects aimed at better understanding what is happening on Earth.

Atmospheric scientists around the world agree that the additional carbon dioxide in the air and oceans has come from exponential growth in fossil fuel burning emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

Current carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been for at least 650,000 years, according to ice core data from the Arctic and Antarctic.

Ocean acidity has already increased 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, said Richard Feely, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

By the end of the 21st century that could go up to 150 percent, he said.

"This is not controversial," said Kleypas, referring to the current acidity levels. There's an overwhelming amount of data backing it up, she said.

Bush said he drew inspiration from a documentary on the island chain's biological resources shown at the White House in April by Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker whose father was the late Jacques Cousteau. Over dinner that night, Bush said he also got "a pretty good lecture about life" from marine biologist Sylvia Earle, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

The decision immediately sets aside 139,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies.

Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of it, said the new protected area would dwarf all others.

"It's the single-largest act of ocean conservation in history. It's a large milestone," Lautenbacher said. "It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific. It spawns a lot of the life that permeates the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

Territorial officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid - possibly the first documented in the wild.

"We've known it's possible, but actually most of us never thought it would happen," said Ian Stirling, a polar bear biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton.

Polar bears and grizzlies have been successfully paired in zoos before - Stirling could not speculate why - and their offspring are fertile.

According to the Swiss-based conservation group, known by its acronym IUCN, the number of species classified as being in serious danger of extinction rose from about 15,500 in its previous "Red List" report, published in 2004.

The list includes one in three amphibians, a quarter of the world's mammals and coniferous trees, and one in eight birds, according to a preview of the 2006 Red List. The full report is published later this week.

"Biodiversity loss is increasing, not slowing down," said Achim Steiner, the conservation group's director general. "The implications of this trend for the productivity and resilience of ecosystems and the lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on them are far-reaching."

The Red List classifies about 40,000 species according to their risk of extinction and provides a searchable online database of the results. The total number of species on the planet is unknown, with 15 million being the most widely accepted estimate. Up to 1.8 million are known today.

Last year a monstrous scam was uncovered.

It involved creating the world's largest single plantation - the size of four million football fields - right in the middle of a rainforest that has survived many millions of years.

Much of the land chosen turned out to be unsuitable for plantations. It was too steep and too elevated. But that was never the point of the exercise.

The real plan was to chop down as much valuable hardwood as possible and sell it to China.

After all, why put plantations on Borneo's vast swathes of empty land when you can carve up the forests and make a fortune before you have even started? And, in the process, destroy one of the world's last great biological treasure houses.

During the last decades the once species-rich rainforest of Samboja Lestari was cleared and burnt down relentlessly. Nutrient-consuming elephant grass took over completely. What remained was an ecological waste land. Nowadays it is already visible that this doesn't have to stay - since 2001 BOS is creating new rainforest. An innovative concept of reforestation and protection is changing this area of over 16 mio sqm into a natural habitat again. In tropical Borneo plants grow much faster than in Europe. Already within a few years the first orang-utans can be released to share their freedom with other animals A nature reserve is being created for the permanent use of humans, animals and plants in Samboja Lestari ("eternal Samboja").

But Greenpeace says in a report released on Tuesday that recent studies estimate that the actual number of such deaths will be 93,000.

Stressing that there is a problem with diagnosis, it adds that other illnesses could take the toll to 200,000.

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters news agency.

"The only methodology that is accepted is for calculating fatal cancers."

But in its report, Greenpeace suggests there will be 270,000 cases of cancer alone attributable to Chernobyl fallout, and that 93,000 of these will probably be fatal.

Blake Lee-Harwood, campaigns director at Greenpeace, told the BBC that cancer was likely to be the cause of less than half of the final fatalities.

"We're also looking at intestinal problems, heart and circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems, and particularly effects on the immune system," he told the BBC's World Today programme.

A study by the New Economics Foundation (Nef) and the Open University says 16 April is the day when the nation goes into "ecological debt" this year.

It warns if annual global consumption levels matched the UK's, it would take 3.1 Earths to meet the demand.

But bio-geography professor Philip Stott criticised the "doomsday report", arguing it would hit poorer nations.

"What we tend to have - not just with this report but alternative reports on the other side - are two theological positions," said Prof Stott, of London University.

"This one is the kind of Doomsday report - on the other hand the total free-traders are far too optimistic."

What is clear is that over the past century, the world's fish stocks have shrunk. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says that one-quarter of the world's marine stocks are overfished, or harvested faster than the fish can reproduce to replace them, and another half are approaching that point.

Nearly half of the two dozen fisheries managed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission are listed as depleted or unknown, including the American lobster, red drum and river herring.

The loss of a stock even temporarily, scientists say, can cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars and echo throughout the ecosystem, affecting humans, too.

But measuring nature's bounty remains a challenge. Where science leaves a gap, politics rushes in.

In 1992, the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery, which devastated Canadian and American fishermen and uprooted entire towns, came about partly because politicians ignored dismal harvest figures in favor of more optimistic forecasts, scientists say.

If the acceleration continues at the current rate, the scientists warn that sea levels could rise during this century by between 28 and 34cm.

Dr John Church, a scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation based in Tasmania and an author of the study, said that higher sea levels could have grave effects on some areas.

"It means there will be increased flooding of low-lying areas when there are storm surges," he told the Associated Press.

"It means increased coastal erosion on sandy beaches; we're going to see increased flooding on island nations."

Youlsau Bells of Palau, a chain of 200 islands in Micronesia in the Pacific with a population of 17,000, said causeways connecting the seven inhabited islands had always been dry even at high tide, but now they were covered half the time. Three islands are just above sea level and their 7,000-strong population may have to be evacuated.

The researchers also found that water evaporation rates across the country have decreased in the same period, by about 1.5 inches per decade. The dip in solar radiation, combined with other factors such as increased temperatures and wind speeds, are likely behind this trend, said lead researcher Yun Qian from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory(PNNL) in Washington.

Adding further support to this hypothesis is that cloud cover, the other likely explanation, has actually decreased in China over the past half century, by 0.78 percent each decade.

Eliminating clouds from the dimming equation leaves little doubt that fossil fuel emissions, which have increased by nine-fold in the past half-century, is blanketing China in a foggy haze that absorbs and deflects sunlight, the researchers say.

"What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme.

Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment.

"What we're trying to do is build a back-up to these, so that a sample of all the material in these gene banks can be kept in the gene bank in Spitsbergen," Mr Hawtin added.

The Norwegian government is due to start work on the seed vault next year, when it will drill into a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about 966km (600 miles) from the North Pole.

Norwegian scientists have found that killer whales - or orcas, as they are sometimes known - have overtaken polar bears at the head of the toxic table.

No other arctic mammals have ingested such a high concentration of hazardous man-made chemicals.

The Norwegian Polar Institute tested blubber samples taken from creatures in Tysfjord in the Norwegian Arctic.

The chemicals they found included pesticides, flame retardants and PCBs - which used to be used in many industrial processes.

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (Omi) and other key equipment on Aura can build a daily picture of air quality.

The pollution maps, which can see detail at the city scale, will be used to identify problem hotspots.

"This is the first time that we have been able to follow pollution globally from day to day," said Pieternel Levelt, of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who is Omi's principal investigator.

"This will help us understand how pollution is formed and where it comes from, its sources; and where it goes to, its sinks.

Aura (Latin for breeze) was launched July 15, 2004. The design life is five years with an operational goal of six years. Aura flies in formation about 15 minutes behind Aqua. Aura is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS), a program dedicated to monitoring the complex interactions that affect the globe using NASA satellites and data systems.

Researchers can now decipher the intricate history of ice movements in the just-released "Mosaic of Antarctica," which uses images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer onboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The map is the result of a partnership between NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder; and the University of New Hampshire, Durham. BR>
A second map to be released early next year will provide the most complete and accurate topographical survey of the continent ever undertaken, with more than 65 million points surveyed from space by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System orbiting on NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat). This "digital elevation model" produced at Goddard will be distributed by NSIDC in a format compatible with the Mosaic map. BR>
"The Antarctic Mosaic shows a lot of very subtle changes in the slope of the terrain that you cannot see from the ground," says Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of Goddard's Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory. "These subtle variations are important because they tell us the direction the ice is flowing now and they indicate where it has gone in the past. The surface roughness also tells us about the bed underneath the ice and whether the ice is sliding over the bed or frozen to it."

The map will very likely reveal unseen features and new opportunities for exploration, Bindschadler said. "Antarctica is a big place, and there is still an awful lot of the ice sheet that hasn't been explored." The new map will be used by researchers to identify interesting areas and plan expeditions to investigate them.

Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, whose group carried out the analysis, says he is not yet sure if the change is temporary or signals a long-term trend. "We don't want to say the circulation will shut down," he told New Scientist. "But we are nervous about our findings. They have come as quite a surprise."

The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf Stream - currents that bring warm water north from the tropics. At around 40° north - the latitude of Portugal and New York – the current divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface current known as the subtropical gyre, while the rest continues north, leading to warming winds that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C.

But when Bryden's team measured north-south heat flow last year, using a set of instruments strung across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, they found that the division of the waters appeared to have changed since previous surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow southwards at depth, they calculate that the quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen by around 30%.

A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden -- launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists -- warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.

Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.

The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.

Providing amenity space for building users — replacing a yard or patio

Increasing roof life span

Reducing storm water run off

Providing noise insulation

Filtering pollutants and CO2 out of the air

Providing locally grown food (with roof-top vegetable gardens)

Increasing wildlife habitat in built up areas

Reducing heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building

Reducing the urban heat island effect

"Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It's very widespread in some parts of the world," Collins said in a conversation from space with Japanese officials in Tokyo, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

"We would like to see, from the astronauts' point of view, people take good care of the Earth and replace the resources that have been used," said Collins, who was standing with Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi in front of a Japanese flag and holding a colorful fan.

Twenty years ago forest fires destroyed about two million hectares of Siberian forests - the loss of an area the size of Wales. Last year 22 million hectares - about half the size of France - were lost to fire. Russian forestry scientists said they were bracing themselves for this year's fire season, which starts in late June.

Siberia's largest forest, the taiga, accounts for one fifth of the world's total forested land and contains half of the planet's evergreen forest. Yet in the space of a couple of decades this seemingly unlimited expanse of trees has suffered an unprecedented tenfold increase in the rate of deforestation caused by fire.