World Environmental Trends Between 1972 and 1982

The United Nations General Assembly has instructed the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme to keep the world environmental situation under review. In 1982, 10 years after the UN Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm, the first comprehensive report on the state of the global environment is being published. The present paper, by the Editors of that Report, summarizes its main findings. It first reviews changes in the sectors of The Biosphere (while recognizing that the interlinkages between them have been stressed increasingly during the past decade), before turning to the human components of the total Man—environment system. In the atmosphere, rising carbon dioxide concentrations, acidification of rain and snow in or by industrial regions, and stratospheric…