Conditions on Earth are worsening with escalating environmental crises pushing billions of people into peril, an international report for the United Nations has warned.
The Global Environment Outlook report says widespread land degradation, water contamination, deforestation and plastic pollution combined with escalating climate change have left the planet in “uncharted territory”.
Risks of hitting “tipping points” where irreversible damage is caused are increasing, with potentially “catastrophic consequences” for human health, economic prosperity and global security.
The report was compiled by 287 scientists from 82 countries, including Ireland, and is published with a plea for an unprecedented co-ordinated global effort to counteract the “growing peril”.
RM Block
The authors say $8 trillion (€6.87 trillion) is needed every year until 2050 for measures to combat climate change and conserve and restore nature.
After that, the investment will begin to pay back in greater human wellbeing, security and prosperity, reaching returns of $20 trillion annually between 2050 and 2070, and up to $100 trillion annually thereafter.
Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the report presented humanity with a clear choice.
“Continue down the road to a future devastated by climate change, dwindling nature, degraded land and polluted air, or change direction to secure a healthy planet, healthy people and healthy economies,” she said. “This is no choice at all.”
The outlook report provides a stark picture of the state of the planet.
Between 20-40 per cent of land is degraded and topsoil essential for food production is lost at a rate of over three tonnes per person annually when drought turns it to desert, rising seas destroy it with salt, floods and landslides wash it away and development compacts it beyond use.
More than 4.5 million square kilometres of coastal waters have become “dead zones” incapable of supporting marine life.
Extreme weather events have cost on average $143 billion annually over the last 20 years.
Nine million people die from pollution-related causes each year, and health-related costs from air pollution alone were $8.1 trillion in a single year.
About 8 billion tonnes of plastic waste already pollutes the planet and the volume is growing.
Health-related costs associated with exposure to toxic chemicals in plastics run at $1.5 trillion annually.
One in eight species are at risk of extinction. The loss of some, including the Black Rhino, California Condor and Bornean Orangutan, is imminent.
Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, as is average global temperature.
The scientists say current conditions are already serious enough for several tipping points to be reached.
These include the complete melt of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the death of all tropical coral reefs and permafrost thaw which would release vast amounts of methane, accelerating climate change.
“The world’s largest ice sheets, on Antarctica and Greenland, are losing ice mass at alarming rates,” the report says in the chapter on oceans of which Karen Wiltshire, professor of climate science at Trinity College Dublin, is one of two co-ordinating lead authors.
The extensive report, which runs to more than 1,200 pages, call for “sweeping transformations” across society and economies.
The authors want GDP replaced as a measure of economic health with a system reflecting the true cost of goods in terms of their impact on the environment.
Reduced meat consumption and more plant-based diets are also urged.
They call for the rapid transition away from fossil fuels to renewable power and the adoption of no-waste economies where all materials are perpetually reused.
These are no longer “simply environmental issues”, they say.
“They are also economic, development, governance, security, social, moral, and ethical issues.”
