UN General Assembly
1988

Armed conflicts afflict people in a brutal and shockingly palpable way. There are, however, other kinds of threats, which develop slowly and less spectacularly, but which in time have come to constitute a danger to the entire planet. Among those are environmental degradation and its dramatic and large-scale effects. As a threat to our survival it is not inferior to the arms race. Alarming research reports tell us that the climate has begun to change as a probable result of the greenhouse effect. Life-giving resources are being destroyed by erosion, desertification and the devastation of forests. People's health is increasingly being affected by the poisoning of water and food chains and depletion of the ozone layer. The causes of these threats to the environment lie in excessive exploitation of natural resources, brought on by poverty, and in industrial pollution and waste of resources, not least in the field of energy. The impact of man on the environment may have reached the threshold of unknown environmental disasters.