Vital Signs 1996

VITAL SIGNS, WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE
This fifth edition of Vital Signs: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future will, we believe, be more useful than ever in allowing policymakers, journalists, and academic researchers to chart and understand the major ecological, economic, and social forces affecting the world. In 1996, we have included 33 key indicators, most of which present data from 1950 through 1995, and an additional 12 special features.
This year's report, produced by 14 contributing researchers, includes most of the basic indicators we have been charting since 1992, such as world population, grain production, and carbon emissions. But it also incorporates 10 entirely new vital signs, all of them in Part 2. In this section, we continue to seek out new, less noticed, trends, many of which are not regularly charted by the world's national and international statistical agencies.