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COSTING THE EARTH
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MISSED A PROGRAMME?
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in.
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Contact Costing the Earth |
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LISTEN AGAIN Ìý30 min |
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PRESENTER |
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'Costing the Earth confronts accepted views on the environment. I think the programme consistently manages to get the real story and tell it in a way that makes people care.'
Miriam O'Reilly
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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| Perth, Australia |
Perth in Western Australia is the world’s most isolated metropolis. It’s an affluent city with a rapidly growing population of nearly two million people who live in the sprawling suburbs and enjoy the outdoor life. They’re surrounded by desert to the east and the Indian Ocean to the west.
Yet despite being in one of the driest climates in the world, Perth boasts an extraordinarily high number of European style gardens, complete with green lawns and English flowers. But Perth’s climate has changed over the last thirty years, making it the first major city to be confronted with global warming.
There has been a dramatic decline in annual rainfall and an increase in temperature. Water levels have dropped and have not been replenished. Yet people have continued to use it as if it were an unlimited resource. The situation has become so serious that the Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery predicted that unless it made drastic changes, Perth could become the world’s first ghost metropolis, an abandoned city with no more water to sustain its population.
Scientists are working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen. However, the environmentalists argue that what’s really needed in order to prevent Perth becoming that future ghost town is a radical change in behaviour, a reduction in water consumption and a readiness to pay more for it.
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RELATED LINKS
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/
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