One good thing about trends is that they tell you how good things are, and how better things are going to be. One bad thing about trends is that they tell you how bad things are, and how worse things will turn out to be. The "Vital Signs" series of Worldwatch Institute has been doing just that for nine years now. As the authors stress in their foreword, "the picture that emerges from the broad panoply of topics is one of astonishing disparity among the world's people - inequalities of wealth, power, opportunities, and survival prospects". Their assertion sounds somewhat close to the findings of the Human Development Reports brought out by the United Nations Development Program with an environmental angle to it. True.

The energy transition has accelerated. Burning of coal fell by 3 per cent in the last year alone. This fossil fuel had to fall out of favour, but what is more striking is the gradual shift of focus away from nuclear power. The world nuclear power generating capacity had swollen by 140 per cent in the 1980s, but only less than 5 per cent in the Nineties. In 1999, the figure was a minuscule 0.4 per cent. Priorities (read, trends) clearly are changing. The emphasis is more on wind and solar energy. While nuclear power, the energy source that was too cheap to meter, is now too costly to use; wind-generated electricity is more attractive for its falling costs.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning, nevertheless, have remained constant at around 6.3 billion tonnes per year. The predictable result is that atmospheric concentrations of carbondioxide are being increasing pushed beyond fixable limits. The fallout - destructive storms and melting of the ice cover - is inevitable. Weather-related damage in 1999 was around $67 million. More than 30,000 lives were lost in Venezuela and another 15,000 in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. The Arctic Sea ice has thinned by 40 per cent in the last 40 years; the Alps have lost 50 per cent of their glacial mass in the last century. The Himalayan snow-ice mass is projected to shrink by 20 per cent in the next three and half decades.

While climate change shows little sign of improving, world grain production dropped by more than 2 per cent last year. The per capita grain production worldwide has fallen by 10 per cent in the last 16 years. This has been more pronounced in the former Soviet Union republics and Africa. Animal protein consumption, however, has increased. What has happened in the bargain is that the two traditional sources of animal protein - rangelands, which account for much of the world's beef and mutton production, and oceanic fisheries, which was responsible for a fivefold growth in world fish catch between 1950 and 1998 - have reached their productive limits. It is a question of time before the per capita animal protein consumption too starts plummeting.

While trends on food from land and water is not particularly encouraging, land and water sources are still under constant pressure. World grain area fell from 732 million hectares in 1981 to 674 million hectares in 1999, mainly because highly eroded cropland was being returned to grass or trees in the United States and China. But cropland is also being used for non-farm uses. Food production is becoming more and more unsustainable with the overpumping of underground aquifers. In fact, 480 million people worldwide are being fed with food produced by unsustainable use of water. This is a difficult trend to change: if water table the world over were to be stablised now, world grain harvest would fall by 160 million tonnes.

Yes, the key factor in the trebling of world grain harvest in the last 50 years has been increased land productivity. Many high-yielding crops are simply approaching their physiological capacity to absorb additional nutrients. The use of genetically modified crops has reduced insecticide use on cotton and corn, it has had little effect on crop production. The area under genetically modified crops rose to 40 million hectares between 1995 and 1999, mounting concern among consumers and environmentalists over the possible deleterious effects of these crops are likely to see the area in the United States alone to drop by 15-20 per cent in 2000.

An instance of a related positive trend that can be given a boost is organic farming. Much of the agricultural economy around the world has stagnated, but sales of organic products are growing by more than 20 per cent annually. Organic farmers are substituting agrochemicals with a greater diversity of crops, rotations, and sophisticated pest control strategies. Organic farming can reduce groundwater pollution, threats to wildlife, and consumer exposure to pesticides. Farmers in Europe have doubled the area cultivated with organic methods to 4 million hectares in only 3 years. In Italy and Austria, the share of agricultural land certified organic topped 10 percent in 1999.

What has also been increasing is the world economy itself: nearly $41 trillion of goods and services were produced in 1999, but 45 per cent of the income went to the 12 per cent of the world's people in developed countries. But international trade remained virtually stagnant. The share of world economic output traded during the year, therefore, fell a little compared to the previous year. In other words, all said and done, according to this key indicator globalisation declined slightly in 1999.

The sphere in which globalisation did not show any downward trend was in information. The number of fixed-line telephones showed a gain of 7 per cent over the preceding year (844 million users in 1999); the number of cellular phone subscribers jumped by 48 per cent in 1999 alone (319 million users in 1999). The growth of the Internet, needless to say, was the most remarkable change in this field. By the end of the year, 72 million host computers were connected to the Net (67 per cent plus over 1998) enabling 260 million people to be online. Internet access in developing countries doubled. Worldwide e-commerce was $111 billion, triple of what it was the previous year. Even now less than 1 per cent of the population in India, China, or the continent of Africa are yet to go online. The disparity persists.

How much the Internet will change disparities around the world is anybody's guess. Only 4 per cent of the world's population is connected to the Internet now. Some 87 per cent of these users live in industrialised countries. Advertising on the Net may be increasing, yet American online companies spent more than $1 billion to advertise on television and in magazines during the year. The Net will not be all in all. There is a silver lining somewhere though. E-commerce can prevent the annual release of 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gases by reducing the need for up to 3 billion square feet of energy-consuming office buildings and malls in the United States itself.

If only population growth rates would show diametrically opposite trends. The last one billion people were added in the last 12 years, and about 1.1 billion young men and women are reaching reproductive age. Most of this distressing trend is concentrated in South Asia and Africa. The world's poorest regions are growing most rapidly because inadequate social services and economic opportunities leave couples dependent on large families for financial security and with little power to determine their family size. With freshwater availability essentially fixed, the number of people living in water-scarce regions will sky-rocket from 470 million to 3 billion in 2030.

The disparities taken into account, the North cannot remain totally isolated from many global threats. The resurgence in tuberculosis may kill an additional 70 million people by 2020. A catastrophic decline in amphibians is wiping out a rich source for new medicines. The warming atmosphere has spurred more severe weather events, including the December 1999 storms that caused nearly $10 billion in damage in Central and Western Europe.

Although recent research has confirmed that a number of pesticides, industrial compounds, and other chemicals can interfere with human and animal endocrine systems, more than 1,000 new chemicals are introduced to the global market each year without testing for these effects. Insufficient public awareness, the spread of intravenous drug use, and widespread unsafe sexual behaviour portend an ongoing explosion of the AIDS epidemic. Almost 50 million people have so far been infected by the HIV virus, and 16 million have died. Weakening the immune system of its victims, AIDS is also the single largest contributor to a worldwide resurgence in TB.

Tax reform, say the authors, is one policy tool that can accelerate positive environmental change. By levying taxes on fossil fuels and pesticides and other pollutants, governments can 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. Environmental taxes must be boosted above the 3 percent of worldwide tax revenue they now generate if they are to halt global environmental decline, the Worldwatch writers feel.

International treaties too can help 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. The 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion is among the most successful pacts, spurring a nearly 90 per cent drop in global chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions. However, most of these treaties are neither strong enough nor monitored and enforced sufficiently to reverse ecological decline.

Some trends are good, some are bad, and others ugly. But which will change and which will not depends on policymakers and their enforcing agencies. To see for ourselves what has changed and what has not, we might have to wait for the 13^th issue of "Vital Signs" next year.