However, farmers around the world are expected to scale back plantings of genetically modified seeds in 2000. Tax reform is one of several policy tools that can accelerate positive environmental change. By levying taxes on fossil fuels and pesticides and other pollutants, governments can simultaneously reduce environmental decay and reduce levies on income, wages, profits, and built property. In the last decade, eight Western European countries pioneered tax shifts, raising taxes on environmentally harmful activities and using the revenue to cut conventional taxes. Although these nations have taken the first modest steps, environmental taxes must be boosted above the 3 percent of worldwide tax revenue they now generate if they are to halt global environmental decline.
International treaties can help to push reforms forward.
The list of international environmental accords now numbers almost 240. Five were forged in the past year alone, and more than two-thirds of the total were crafted since the 1972 UN conference on the environment in Stockholm. However, most of these treaties are neither strong enough nor monitored and enforced sufficiently to reverse ecological decline. Growth in the satellite remote sensing industry is a potentially beneficial trend for environmental protection efforts. Satellites can collect detailed information about parts of the Earth that are otherwise difficult to access, and can record changes to the environment over large areas and long periods of time.