Resources and Environment
The country's natural resources include bauxite, iron ore, diamonds, gold, uranium, hydropower, and fish. It has 2% arable land but no permanent cropland; 22% of its area is permanent pasture, and 59% is forest or woodland as of 1993. 930 km² (1993 est.) of land is irrigated.
Current environmental issues in Guinea include: deforestation; inadequate supplies of potable water; desertification; soil contamination and erosion; and overfishing and overpopulation in forest regions. Guinea is party to the following international environmental agreements: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Wetlands.
Read more about this topic: Geography Of Guinea
Famous quotes containing the words resources and/or environment:
“Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)