UN Environment Program: Making Peace with Nature

Original paper published by the UN Environmental Programme 

Key Messages

Humanity’s environmental challenges have grown in number and severity ever since the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and now represent a planetary emergency. While tackling the emergency is demanding, this report, Making Peace with Nature, lights a path to a sustainable future with new possibilities and opportunities (figure KM.1).

The top five

• Environmental changes are undermining hard-won development gains by causing economic costs and millions of premature deaths annually. They are impeding progress towards ending poverty and hunger, reducing inequalities and promoting sustainable economic growth, work for all and peaceful and inclusive societies.
• The well-being of today‘s youth and future generations depends on an urgent and clear break with current trends of environmental decline. The coming decade is crucial. Society needs to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to limit warning to 1.5 °C as aspired to in the Paris Agreement, while at the same time conserving and restoring biodiversity and minimizing pollution and waste
• Earth’s environmental emergencies and human well-being need to be addressed together to achieve sustainability. The development of the goals, targets, commitments and mechanisms under the key environmental conventions and their implementation need to be aligned to become more synergistic and effective.
• The economic, financial and productive systems can and should be transformed to lead and power the shift to sustainability. Society needs to include natural capital in decision-making, eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies and invest in the transition to a sustainable future.
• Everyone has a role to play in ensuring that human knowledge, ingenuity, technology and cooperation are redeployed from transforming nature to transforming humankind‘s relationship with nature. Polycentric governance is key to empowering people to express themselves and act environmentally responsibly without undue difficulty or self-sacrifice.

Transforming nature puts human well-being at risk

The current mode of development degrades the Earth’s finite capacity to sustain human well-being

• Human well-being critically depends on the Earth’s natural systems. Yet the economic, technological and social advances have also led to a reduction of the Earth’s capacity to sustain current and future human well-being. Human prosperity relies on the wise use of the planet’s finite space and remaining resources, as well as on the protection and restoration of its life-supporting processes and capacity to absorb waste.
• Over the last 50 years, the global economy has grown nearly fivefold, due largely to a tripling in extraction of natural resources and energy that has fuelled growth in production and consumption. The world population has increased by a factor of two, to 7.8 billion people, and though on average prosperity has also doubled, about 1.3 billion people remain poor and some 700 million are hungry.
• The increasingly unequal and resource-intensive model of development drives environmental decline through climate change, biodiversity loss and other forms of pollution and resource degradation.
• Social, economic and financial systems fail to account for the essential benefits society gets from nature and to provide incentives to manage it wisely and maintain its value. The majority of the essential benefits of nature currently have no financial market value despite being the underpinning of current and future prosperity

Society is failing to meet most of its commitments to limit environmental damage

• Society is not on course to fulfil the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to further limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. At the current rate, warming will reach 1.5°C by around 2040 and possibly earlier. Taken together, current national policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions put the world on a pathway to warming of at least 3°C by 2100. Human-induced current warming of more than 1°C has already led to shifts in climate zones, changes in precipitation patterns, melting of ice sheets and glaciers, accelerating sea level rise and more frequent and more intense extreme events, threatening people and nature.
• None of the agreed global goals for the protection of life on Earth and for halting the degradation of land and oceans have been fully met. Three quarters of the land and two thirds of the oceans are now impacted by humans. One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction, and many of the ecosystem services essential for human wellbeing are eroding.
• Society is on course to restore the Earth’s protective stratospheric ozone layer. However, there is a lot more to be done to reduce air and water pollution, safely manage chemicals, and reduce and safely manage waste.

Read the paper in it’s entirety here.