The most comprehensive assessment of the global environment ever undertaken has found that investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and hunger.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds that climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, and pollution and waste have taken a heavy toll on the planet, people and economies – already costing trillions of dollars each year. Following current development pathways will only intensify this toll.
Between 20 and 40 per cent of land area worldwide is estimated to be degraded, affecting over three billion people, while one million of an estimated eight million species are threatened with extinction.
Nine million deaths are attributable annually to some form of pollution. The economic cost of health damages from air pollution alone was about US$8.1 trillion in 2019 – or around 6.1 per cent of global GDP.
The state of the environment will dramatically worsen if the world continues to power economies under a business-as-usual pathway. Without action, global mean temperature rise is likely to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s, exceed 2.0°C by the 2040s and keep climbing. On this path, climate change would cut 4 per cent off annual global GDP by 2050 and 20 per cent by the end of the century.
Land degradation is expected to continue at current rates, with the world losing fertile and productive land the size of Colombia or Ethiopia annually – at a time when climate change could reduce per-person food availability by 3.4 per cent by 2050.
The 8,000 million tonnes of plastic waste polluting the planet will continue to accumulate – driving up the estimated health-related economic losses of US$1.5 trillion attributable annually to exposure to toxic chemicals in plastics.
The report calls on governments, non-governmental and multilateral organizations, the private sector, civil society, academia, professional organizations, the public and Indigenous Peoples to acknowledge the urgency of the global environmental crises, build on progress made in recent decades, and collaborate in the co-design and implementation of integrated policies, strategies and actions to deliver a better future for all.