140 



Community will be transferred to the private sector where appro- 

 priate; technology especially useful in answering questions in areas 

 like the environment, law enforcement and medicine. Twelve 

 projects costing $30 million have been selected and roughly half of 

 the money is for environmental projects. 



Intelligence is also applying its special capabilities to other non- 

 traditional areas, such as the environment and related foreign nu- 

 clear safety issues. For several years the CIA has brought a value- 

 added to the work done on these problems, in our analysis, our 

 unique collection assets, and in our ability to collect and assimilate 

 vast quantities of information. 



For example, CIA analysts assessed the scope of the unprece- 

 dented environmental damage which occurred when Iraqi forces 

 sabotaged Kuwaiti oil fields last year. Agency specialists used en- 

 hanced commercial weather satellite imagery to track daily oil slick 

 movements in the Gulf and they used unique collection systems 

 and commercially available Landsat imagery to verify the number, 

 location and status of the burning oil wells in Kuwait. The data 

 used by the Central Command in the bombing that stopped the 

 flow of the oil into the Gulf was provided by U.S. Intelligence. CIA 

 worked with private experts to develop and build a computer model 

 capable of projecting concentrations of key pollutants, primarily 

 sulfur dioxide and particulates, and their impact on human health 

 and crops. 



Since the late 1980's the Intelligence Community has been con- 

 tributing to U.S. government efforts to work with other countries 

 to protect the global environment from a host of threats: 



Ozone depletion, which poses risks of increased skin cancer, 

 blindness, declining agricultural yields, and fisheries losses, will 

 only be stopped by a worldwide effort, as laid out in the Montreal 

 Protocol, to stop using chlorofluorocarbons, CFC's. The Intelligence 

 Community has been following this problem for several years and 

 is starting work on a program to determine whether we can mon- 

 itor emissions of CFC's. 



Tropical deforestation is a phenomenon that jeopardizes the 

 world's climate, causes local problems such as flooding and mud 

 slides, and leads to the extinction of plant and animal species. CIA 

 analysts have done work on these issues, using satellite imagery 

 and other tools to support U.S. policy makers in their multi-year 

 effort to secure an international treaty on forest protection. 



Possible climate change, and measures adopted by governments 

 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert it, have 

 potentially far-reaching consequences. As U.S. negotiators worked 

 at length to forge an international agreement on this important 

 issue that opened for signature two months ago in Rio, CIA ana- 

 lysts provided them, over the course of a three-year period, with a 

 comprehensive series of reports on this multi-faceted problem. 



Other similar issues that are the subject of ongoing analj^ic 

 work include ocean dumping of hazardous substances; water scar- 

 city and degradation; the environmental consequences of narcotics 

 cultivation; the impact of earthquakes and other natural disasters; 

 food shortages, and agricultural resources decline; and the pres- 

 sures faced by developing and industrialized countries alike as they 

 grapple with the costs of environmental protection. While some of 



