Three-fold environmental emergency ‘killing planet’
Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution a perfect storm: UN
HUMANS are making Earth a broken and increasingly unliveable planet through climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, a new United Nations report has warned.
The study, titled Making Peace With Nature, calls on the global community to make dramatic changes to society, economics and daily life.
Unlike past UN reports that focused on one issue and avoided telling leaders actions to take, this latest report combines three intertwined environmental crises and tells the world what has to change.
It calls for modifications to what governments tax, how nations value economic output, how power is generated and the way people get around, fish, farm and eat.
“Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive,” warned UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres.
“For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.
“The result is three interlinked environmental crises.”
Sir Robert Watson, the report’s lead author, explained: “Our children and their children will inherit a world of extreme weather events, sea level rises, a drastic loss of plants and animals, food and water insecurity and an increasing likelihood of future pandemics.”
The scientist, who has chaired past UN science reports on climate change and biodiversity loss, added: “The emergency is in fact more profound than we thought only a few years ago.”
The report also highlighted what co-author Rachel Warren, of the University of East Anglia, called “a litany of frightening statistics that hasn’t really been brought together”.
The takeaway figures from the study were:
• Earth is on the way to an additional 3.5 degrees warming, far more than the internationally agreed upon goals in the Paris accord;
• About nine million people a year die from pollution;
• About one million of Earth’s eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction;
• Up to 400 million tons of heavy metals, toxic sludge and other industrial waste are dumped into the world’s waters every year;
• More than three billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15% of Earth’s wetlands remain intact;
• About 60% of fish stocks are fished at the maximum levels;
• There are more than 400 oxygen-depleted “dead zones” and marine plastics pollution has increased tenfold since 1980.
Biologist Thomas Lovejoy, a scientific advisor to the report, said: “In the end it will hit us. It’s not what’s happening to elephants. It’s not what’s happening to climate or sea level rises. It’s all going to impact us.”
The planet’s problems are so interconnected that countries must work together to fix them, Ms Warren stressed.
Many of the solutions, such as eliminating fossil fuel use, combat multiple problems, including climate change and pollution, she added.
The report “makes it clear that there is no time for linear thinking or tackling problems one at a time”, University of Michigan environment professor Rosina Bierbaum said.