People now
HUMANITY has made the planet sick, unleashing climate change, stripping forests, causing mass extinctions of wildlife and polluting air and waterways while the earth buckles under the strain of a population surging towards the 10 billion mark.
This is the warning contained in the sixth Global Environment Outlook, the most comprehensive report of its kind, released in Nairobi, Kenya, this week by the UN Environment Programme.
The 745-page report offers a grim assessment of the planet’s ill health but remarkably, it also provides some hope for the future.
“GEO-6 is an essential check-up for our planet,” writes UN secretary-general António Guterres. “Like any good medical examination, there is a clear prognosis of what will happen if we continue with business as usual and a set of recommended actions to put things right.”
The theme, “Healthy Planet, Healthy People”, highlights the “inextricable link between the environment and our survival and progress”.
Yet the challenges its authors – 250 scientists and experts – outline are multiple.
“From climate change to the extinction of species, economies too dependent on the wasteful use of resources and unprecedented pressure on terrestrial and marine ecosystems, we are at a decisive moment in our role as custodians of the planet,” he notes.
Though there has been some progress, “we need a significant shift in trajectory – the kind of transformational change prescribed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its recent report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees” but missing ingredient is “collective resolve”.
Economically, says the GEO6, countries are still guided by an approach of “grow now, clean up later.
“This is simply not sustainable in a world already crossing planetary boundaries on a number of dimensions, which threatens to undermine economic growth if not addressed.”
It’s often costlier than preventing damage in the first place.
“It creates stranded assets which lose their value, and is now leading to irreversible negative impacts, including on human health.
“This renders an economy unproductive and uncompetitive compared with a flexible and proactive approach, capable of managing the transition to a sustainable, innovative and resource-efficient economy that can take advantage of opportunities in fast-growing, environmentally aware markets.”
Protecting the environment, and preventing and mitigating pollution, “are major sources of economic opportunity, providing jobs, reducing poverty, driving innovation and addressing resource availability/scarcity and depletion”.
Humanity has been seriously affected by ongoing systemic ecological changes, such as climate change and deforestation.
“These have reached the point that the ecological foundations of human society and natural systems that support other species and provide invaluable ecosystem services are in great danger.
“Human activities are causing increasing amounts of pollution, to the extent this is now recognised as