The latest edition of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Global Environment Outlook (see News) offers a sobering assessment of our current environmental prospects and a bold statement on the opportunity to change course.
Compiled by 287 multidisciplinary scientists from 82 countries, GEO-7 is, UNEP tells us, the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment ever carried out.
The report’s message on prospects is partly conveyed in terms of global gross domestic product, offering a boost to the global economy by $20 trillion a year by 2070.
This offers a clear statement that the report’s call for action on the environment is not an anti-growth message. Meanwhile, UNEP sums up the GEO-7 assessment by saying the scientific consensus is that current development pathways will bring ‘catastrophic climate change, devastation to nature and biodiversity, debilitating land degradation and desertification, and lingering deadly pollution’. In short, our current trajectory is unsustainable.
So, on water, the report’s freshwater chapter sets out a range of metrics that give cause for concern. They cover the resource itself, including availability, withdrawals, drought and the impacts of climate change. They include pollution from multiple sources, biodiversity loss, the impacts of irrigation, and so on. But the main aim of GEO-7 is to point to a possible way ahead – through a fundamental transformation of key societal systems.
To this end, the report calls for change across five areas. The first is the transformation of economic and financial systems, including integrating externalities and a nature-positive economy approach. In the area of materials and waste, the overriding need is to ensure circularity and efficient use of resources. Energy transformation includes diversification and decarbonisation, while action on food includes resilience of food production and the enhancement of circularity.
The fifth area is the environment. Goals here include restoring natural capital, while five solution pathways aimed at achieving those goals include broad adoption of nature-based solutions.
What is perhaps of most interest is the extent to which water is not the overt focus of the report, with the report’s forward-looking agenda projected through the five areas mentioned above.
Water’s role across these five areas is variable but wide-ranging. It includes the externalities currently missing from pricing, potential negative impacts of the bioeconomy, energy benefits of nature-based solutions, and the strong connection between food and both water demand and pollution. And, certainly, water is integral to the highlighted need for rapid scaling up of locally led adaptation and disaster risk management in the face of climate change.
The task from a water perspective is, therefore, to seek out these touchpoints, to inform the agendas, build alliances to help drive them forward, and at the same time connect thinking to ensure a joined-up approach as far as water is concerned.
This is what working outside of siloes looks like. It is also how water can be part of delivering on the report’s subtitle: why investing in Earth now can lead to a trillion-dollar benefit for all.
Keith Hayward, Editor
