UNEP Global Environment Outlook 6 (Part 2)

GEO-6 is the most comprehensive report on the global environment since 2012. It addresses the main challenge of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that no one should be left behind, and that all should live healthy, fulfilling lives for the full benefit of all, for present and future generations.

The Report aims to help policymakers and all of society achieve the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals, internationally agreed environmental goals and the multilateral environmental agreements. It does so by assessing recent scientific information and data, analyzing current and past environmental policy, and identifying future options for achieving sustainable development by

2050.

GEO-6 tries to answer questions such as:

·      What is the current state of the environment and why?

·      How successful have we been in achieving our internationally agreed environmental goals?

·      Have there been successful environmental policies?

·      What are the policy lessons learned and possible solutions?

·      Is the current policy response enough?

·      What are the business as usual scenarios and what does a sustainable future look like?

·      What are the emerging issues and megatrends including their possible impacts?

·      What are the possible pathways to achieving Agenda 2030 and other internationally agreed environmental goals?

The Key Messages of GEO-6:

·      The overall environmental situation is deteriorating globally and the window for action is closing.

·      Unsustainable production and consumption patterns and trends as well as inequality, combined with population growth-driven increase in resource use, put at risk the healthy planet needed to attain sustainable development. These trends are deteriorating planetary health at unprecedented rates with increasingly serious consequences especially for poorer people and regions.

·      The world is not on track to achieve the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals, and other internationally agreed environmental goals, by 2030 and is not on track to deliver long-term sustainability by 2050. Urgent action and strengthened international cooperation are now needed to reverse those negative trends and restore the planet and human health.

·      Past and present greenhouse gas emissions have already committed the world to an extended period of climate change with multiple and increasing environmental and society-wide risks.

·      Air pollution, currently the cause of 6 to 7 million premature deaths per year, is projected to continue to have significant negative effects on health, and still cause between 4.5 million and 7 million premature deaths annually by mid-century.

·      Biodiversity loss from land-use change, and habitat fragmentation, overexploitation and illegal wildlife trade, invasive species, pollution and climate change is driving a mass extinction of species, including critical ecosystem service providers such as pollinators. This mass extinction compromises Earth’s ecological integrity and capacity to meet human needs.

·      Marine plastic litter, including microplastics, occurs in all levels of the marine ecosystem and also shows up in fisheries and shellfish at alarming levels and frequency. The adverse impact of marine microplastic on the marine system is unknown with potential health impacts through the consumption of fish and marine products. More research on the magnitude of the problem is still needed.

·      Land degradation is an increasing threat for human well-being and ecosystems, especially for those in rural areas who are most dependent on land productivity. Land degradation hotspots cover approximately 29 per cent of global land, where 3.2 billion people reside.

·      Natural resources, including freshwater and oceans, are too often over-exploited, poorly managed and polluted. Approximately 1.4 million people die annually from preventable diseases, such as diarrhoea and intestinal parasites, that are associated with pathogen-polluted drinking water and inadequate sanitation

·      Antibiotic-resistant infections are projected to become a main cause of death worldwide by 2050. Affordable, widely available wastewater treatment technologies, to remove antibiotic residues could have huge benefits for all countries. Even greater efforts should be made to control mismanagement of antibacterial drugs at source, in human and agricultural use.

·      The harmful impacts of inappropriate use of pesticides, heavy metals, plastics and other substances are of significant concern as such compounds appear in alarmingly high levels in our food supply. They primarily affect vulnerable members of society, such as infants exposed to elevated levels of chemicals. The impacts of neurotoxins and endocrine-disrupting chemicals are potentially multi-generational

Transformative change: A call for systemic and integrated policy action

·      The social and economic costs of inaction often exceed the costs of action and are inequitably distributed, often being borne by the poorest and most vulnerable in society, including indigenous and local communities, particularly in developing countries.

·      Current environmental policy alone is not enough to address these challenges. Urgent cross-sectoral policy actions, through a whole-of-society approach, are needed to address the challenges of sustainable development.

·      Achieving internationally agreed environmental goals on pollution control, clean-up and efficiency improvements is crucial, yet insufficient to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Transformative change is needed to enable and combine long-term strategic and integrated policymaking while building bottom-up social, cultural, institutional and technological innovation.

·      Some of the key features of effective environmental policies for sustainable development are integrated objectives, science-based targets, economic instruments, regulations and robust international cooperation.

·      Transformative change that achieves the Sustainable Development Goals and other internationally agreed targets includes a tripling of today’s decarbonization rate as we head towards 2050, a 50 per cent increase in food production and the adoption of healthy and sustainable diets across all regions.

·      The transformative changes needed to achieve sustainable development will be most successful when they are just, respect gender equality, recognize different impacts for men, women, children and the elderly and take into account inherent societal risks.

·      The health co-benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants, including short-lived climate pollutants, together can outweigh the costs of mitigation, while achieving climate and air quality targets, increasing agricultural production and reducing biodiversity loss. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation can also provide environmental and health co-benefits.

·      Sustainable outcomes can best be achieved by combining objectives for resource use efficiency, with ecosystem-based management and better human health, drawing on scientific, indigenous and local knowledge.

Governance of innovations:

·      Food, energy and transport systems as well as urban planning and chemical production, are primary examples of systems of production and consumption needing innovative, effective and integrated policies.

·      Innovations are part of the solution but can also create new risks and have negative environmental impacts. Precautionary approaches can reduce threats of serious or irreversible damage where relevant scientific evidence is insufficient to inform decision making.

·      Innovation in and deployment of technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase resource efficiency can strengthen the economic performance of countries, municipalities, enterprises and other stakeholders.

·      Agreement on desired pathways for transformative change under conditions of uncertainty can be fostered by coalitions between governments, businesses, researchers and civil society.

·      Sustainable development will be more likely to be achieved through new modes of governance and adaptive management that give greater priority to the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals, while promoting gender equality and education for sustainable production and consumption.

Harvest time: Knowledge for sustainability

·      The new sustainability governance models should also ensure adequate investments in knowledge systems such as data, indicators, assessments, policy evaluation and sharing platforms, and act on internationally agreed early signals from science and society to avoid unnecessary harm and costs.

·      Data from satellites, combined with monitoring on the ground, can enable quicker actions across the world, for example in response to extreme weather events. Widening possible access to data, information and knowledge and improving the infrastructure and capacities to harness that knowledge, will enable this data to be put to most effective use.

·      More investment in indicators that integrate different data sources and delineate clearly gender and inequality aspects, will enable better designed policy interventions and their evaluation.

·      Further developments are needed in environmental and natural resource accounting to ensure that environmental costs are internalized into economic decision making for sustainability.

·      Harnessing the ongoing data and knowledge revolution, as well as ensuring the authenticity and validity of these data to support sustainable development, combined with international cooperation, could transform capacities to address challenges and accelerate progress towards sustainable development.

·      Most important is the need to take bold, urgent, sustained, inclusive and transformative action that integrates environmental, economic and social activity to put society on pathways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, multilateral environmental agreements, internationally agreed environmental goals and other science-based targets.

UNEP Global Environment Outlook 6 (Part 1)

In March 2019, the UN Environment Program released the sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), focusing on the theme “Healthy Planet, Healthy People”. The following account is based on the GEO-6 Summary published by UNEP.

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) is the result of a consultative and participatory process to prepare an independent assessment of the state of the environment, the effectiveness of the policy response in addressing environmental challenges and the possible pathways to achieving various internationally agreed environmental goals. The GEO is a series of studies that inform environmental decision-making for Governments and other

stakeholders.

The sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), under the theme “Healthy Planet, Healthy People”, aims to provide a sound, evidence-based source of environmental information to help policymakers and all of society to achieve the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and internationally agreed environmental goals, and to implement the multilateral environmental agreements. It does so by assessing recent scientific information and data, analysing current and past environmental policies and identifying future options to achieve

sustainable development by 2050.

Since the first edition of the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) in 1997, there have been many examples of environmental improvement, specially where problems have been well identified, manageable, and where regulatory and technological solutions have been readily available. Much more can be achieved in that regard through more effective implementation of existing policies.

Nevertheless, the overall condition of the global environment has continued to deteriorate since the first edition of GEO, despite environmental policy efforts across all countries and regions. Environmental policy efforts are being hindered by a variety of factors, in particular unsustainable production and consumption patterns in most countries and climate change. GEO-6 concludes that unsustainable human activities globally have degraded the Earth’s ecosystems, endangering the ecological foundations of society.

Urgent action at an unprecedented scale is necessary to arrest and reverse this situation, thereby protecting human and environmental health and maintaining the current and future integrity of global ecosystems. Such key actions include:

·      reducing land degradation, biodiversity loss, and air, land and water pollution;

·      improving water management and resource management;

·      climate change mitigation and adaptation;

·      resource efficiency;

·      addressing decarbonization, decoupling and detoxification; and the

·      prevention and management of risk and disasters.

These key actions require more ambitious and effective policies, including sustainable consumption and production, greater resource efficiency and improved resource management, integrated ecosystem management, and integrated waste management and prevention.

Mainstreaming environmental considerations into social and economic decisions at all levels is of vital importance. In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, GEO-6 shows that environmental issues are best addressed in conjunction with related economic and social issues, taking into account synergies and trade-offs between different goals and targets, including consideration of equity and gender dimensions. Governance

can be improved at the local, national, regional and global levels, including broad coordination between policy areas. More ambitious and effectively implemented environmental policies are necessary, but alone they are not sufficient to meet sustainable development objectives. At the same time as ensuring sustainable sources of financing for sustainable development and aligning financing flows with environmental priorities, capacities have to be strengthened and scientific information taken into account for environmental management. Strong commitment from all

stakeholders, partnerships and international cooperation would greatly facilitate the realization of environmental goals.

GEO-6 shows that a healthy environment is the best foundation for economic prosperity, human health and well‐being. Human behaviour has had various impacts on biodiversity, atmosphere, oceans, water and land.

That environmental degradation, which ranges from serious to irreversible, has had a negative impact on human health. Atmospheric pollution has had the most severe negative impact, followed by degradation of water, biodiversity, ocean and land environment. It is therefore important that opportunities for prosperity and well-being that maintain or regain the integrity of ecosystems should be attained through sustainable development pathways that are shared and pursued globally.

GEO-6 highlights the main global drivers of environmental change, the condition of the environment, the scale and effectiveness of policy responses, the potential pathways for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in an increasingly complex world, and the data and information needs and opportunities that can support decision-making towards achieving those Goals.