UNEP said the book, "One Planet, Many People", which is also aimed at policy makers, gives a clear illustration of major environmental changes that develop gradually over years without being immediately noticed on the ground.

The comparative photographs from space include the emergence of greenhouses for industrial scale farming in Almeria, southern Spain that have turned about 400 square kilometres (160 square miles) of fields and valleys dotted with villages into a solid grey and white patchwork between 1974 to 2004.

They also show the shrinkage of the Arctic icecap as well as glaciers in the Himalayas, European Alps, or South America's Andes, while a swathe of virgin Amazonian rainforest in Brazil turns from solid green in 1975 to stripes of white 25 years later due to logging.

"Most of these changes are very slow. But if you look over periods of five to 10 years you can see dramatic changes on the environment," Pascal Peduzzi of UNEP told journalists.

"The changes are just as impressive as a tsunami or a flood," he said.

Deposits and sediment carried by China's Yellow River have formed a new peninsula jutting into the sea since 1979, effectively making the river about 25 kilometres (15 miles) longer at its estuary.

The US city of Las Vegas expanded in the desert leaching scarce water supplies between 1973 and 2000, while the expansion of Mexico City from a city of nine million inhabitants in 1973 to over 20 million today is stripping forested mountainsides in the pictures.

"Cities pull in huge amounts of resources including water, food, timber, metals and people. They export huge amounts of wastes, including ... wastewater and the gases linked with global warming" said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director.

"Thus their impacts stretch beyond their physical borders affecting countries, regions and planets as a whole," he added.

Peduzzi underlined that the images also showed humanity's capacity to repair environmental damage.

The industrial city of Copsa Mica -- regarded by UNEP as "one of the sickliest in the world" -- and surrounding hills showed up as a black stain on the Romanian countryside in 1986.

Last year the countryside was green again and city buildings could be distinguished from outer space.

The pictures also illustrate the environmental impact of political strife and conflicts.

The Shatt Al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq once had one-fifth of the world's date palms until the 1970s, but the trees were stripped away by wars, pests and development for the oil industry.

Huge marshlands there were also dried up in Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's campaign against political opponents in southern Iraq. Imagery from last year shows renewed irrigation since Saddam was toppled.

Pristine forests in the Parrot's Beak region of Guinea were stripped to make way for tens of thousands of refugees from bloody civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and to provide them with fuel, shelter and crops.

The satellite imagery was donated by the US space agency NASA and the US geological survey.

The atlas was published to coincide with World Environment Day on Sunday.

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