Archive Articles: Are We Getting The Right Statistics. 28th Aug 98
December 27, 2008

We live in a world that is awash with statistics. But are we getting the right statistics? I don’t mean that the figures are wrong – but that we may be getting right figures about the wrong issues?

The Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington DC, is the world’s leading environmental research organization. One of its publications is Vital Signs: The Environmental Trends that are Shaping our Future.

Economic productivity is regularly reported but the state of the natural world rarely gets the same attention. For example, there is a great deal of attention to the world’s oil production but far less attention is given to the fastest-growing energy sources: wind and solar power. World population numbers are now reported by many news organizations but a parallel decline in the number of human languages is not.

Here are four trends worth noting. First, with all the bad weather that has hit Sydney and Wollongong recently, it is worth noting that global weather patterns generally are out of kilter. The Earth is getting warmer. The insurance industry is deeply concerned about this. Higher temperatures of surface waters, particularly in the tropics and sub-tropics, means that more heat is released into the atmosphere. As a result, storm systems are more intense, more frequent and more destructive. And the insurance bills are higher.

Second, the Earth has a total vehicle population of about 496 million vehicles. As urban traffic congestion spreads and air pollution worsens, the social and environmental costs of the growing reliance on the automobiles are escalating, thereby raising concerns within governments. In the US, the traffic congestion price tag for wasted fuel, rising health costs associated with air pollution and lost productivity totals US$ 100 billion. In Bangkok, one of the word’s most congested cities, the typical motorist spends a total of 44 days per year sitting in traffic jams.

Third, a response by governments to these automotive nightmares is to emphasize the use of bicycles. Three times the number of bicycles are produced each year than cars. In the European Union as a whole, bikes have been included, for the first time, in comprehensive transportation plans. Britain intends to increase by 400 per cent the use of bikes by the year 2012. Fourth, half of the world’s languages have gone. The world used to have between 10,00 and 15,000 languages. Today there are only about 6,000 languages. And about half of these are no longer being learned by children and so they are likely to become extinct within the next century. About half of all the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 6,000 people and so they are close to extinction.

The Vital Signs report identifies the Australian situation. Australia is likely to lose 90 per cent of the 250 Aboriginal languages spoken here. On average, one last speaker of an Aboriginal language dies each year in Australia.

To conclude, the Vital Signs report is full of important information that does not receive enough attention in the mass media. If we rely solely on the usual statistics, then we will miss a lot that is important to us.

BROADCAST ON FRIDAY AUGUST 28 1998 ON RADIO 2GB’S “BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME” AT 9 PM, AND ON AUGUST 30 1998 ON “SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE” AT 10.30 PM.