BBC: Green decline 'may bring irreversible change'

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Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18339905

Green decline 'may bring irreversible change'

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News

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With forests and fish stocks declining, water demand rising and lack of action on climate change, humanity's path is anything but sustainable, the UN warns.

The Global Environmental Outlook says significant progress is seen on only four out of 90 environmental goals.

Meanwhile, a team of scientists warns that life on Earth may be on the way to an irreversible "tipping point".

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) urges leaders to agree tough goals at this month's Rio+20 summit.

Where governments have agreed specific treaties, it says, major change has transpired.

However, negotiations leading up to the summit appear mired in problems, with governments failing to find agreement since January on issues such as eliminating subsidies on fossil fuels, regulating fishing on the high seas and obliging corporations to measure their environmental footprint.

"GEO-5 reminds world leaders and nations meeting at Rio+20 why a decisive and defining transition towards a low-carbon, resource-efficient, job-generating 'green economy' is urgently needed," said Achim Steiner, Unep's executive director.

"If current trends continue, if current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail and cannot be reversed, then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation."

Pollution costs
This is the fifth edition of the Global Environmental Outlook, Unep's blue-chip five-yearly assessment of the natural world.

The last, published in 2007, warned that factors such as rising demand for freshwater were affecting human wellbeing.


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For the current edition, researchers assessed progress in 90 important environmental issues.

They concluded that meaningful progress had been made on just four - making petrol lead-free, tackling ozone layer depletion, increasing access to clean water and boosting research on marine pollution.

A further 40 showed some progress, including the establishment of protected habitat for plants and animals on land and slowing the rate of deforestation.

Little or no progress was noted for 24, including tackling climate change, while clear deterioration was found in eight, including the parlous state of coral reefs around the world.

For the remainder, there was too little data to draw firm conclusions.

This is despite more than 700 international agreements designed to tackle specific aspects of environmental decline, and agreements on alleviating poverty and malnutrition such as the Millennium Development Goals.

Among the report's "low-lights" are:

air pollution indoors and outdoors is probably causing more than six million premature deaths each year
greenhouse gas emissions are on track to warm the world by at least 3C on average by 2100
most river basins contain places where drinking water standards are below World Health Organization standards
only 1.6% of the world's oceans are protected.
A few hours after GEO-5's release, the journal Nature published a review of evidence on environmental change concluding that the biosphere - the part of the planet that supports life - could be heading for rapid, possibly irreversible change.

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Rio summit jargon buster
Use the dropdown for easy-to-understand explanations of key terms:
Green economy
Green economy
An economic system that takes account of natural capital and promotes development that does not destroy or degrade natural resources.
The authors, headed by Anthony Barnofsky from the University of California, Berkeley, combined information on major transformations in the Earth's past (such as mass extinctions) with models incorporating the present and the immediate future.

More than 40% of the Earth's land is used for human needs, including cities and farms; and with the population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50%.

Rising demand for resource-expensive foods such as beef could mean it happens by 2025, Prof Barnofsky's modelling suggests.

"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," he said.

"I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from the 50% mark."

Rio calling
At the core of the Rio+20 agenda is the idea of changing many of the factors driving this pattern of environmental decline while also raising living standards for the world's poor.

Unep adds its voice to many others urging world leaders to seize this baton when they assemble in Rio on 20 June.


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Population growth, unsustainable consumption in western and fast-industrialising nations, and environmentally destructive subsidies all need urgent action, it says.

A few years ago the World Bank concluded that destructive fishing practices, fuelled largely by subsidies, had depleted stocks so much that society was missing out on $50bn per year worth of fish it could otherwise have eaten.

The G20 has previously agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies - calculated at over $400bn per year - without setting firm targets or a timetable. Unep says leaders should make specific moves on this in Rio.

The summit - which marks 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit and 40 years since the very first UN environmental gathering in Stockholm - is likely to agree to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs), a concept that Unep endorses.

It points out that factors such as air pollution and climate change are also imposing costs on the global economy - in the US, for example, air pollution is calculated to cut crop yields by $14-26bn each year.

"The moment has come to put away the paralysis of indecision, acknowledge the facts and face up to the common humanity that unites all peoples," said Mr Steiner.

"Rio+20 is a moment to turn sustainable development from aspiration and patchy implementation into a genuine path to progress and prosperity for this and the next generations to come."

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Tell us something we don't know.

[madd0ct0r]

how many more years for the baby boomers to die off?

[Zaune]

how many more years for the baby boomers to die off?

Too bloody many.

[cosmicalstorm]

We brought irreversible change when our ancestors killed of the megafauna that had not already succumbed to climate change back around the younger dryas.

In my mind the future is already fairly clear for the biosphere. We will cause the extinction of almost all life on earth right now, especially all of the large animals. Even if every human falls down dead this day, that is already done. So many populations are below the point of genetic diversity necessary for continuation.
If humanity dies out the survivors will be the small hardy replicators, like rabbits, mice, insects and so on. It will take a very long time, 10-30 million years before our planet is anything like it's "natural self".
I.e a new complete mega fauna, global forests, swamps, rainforests and glaciers, all depending on where in the natural climate cycle it is, that is where in the galactic plane the sun is, what phase the sun is in, what kind of tectonic activity the Earth is up to, any big comets striking Earth or not.

If we do not die out or if we leave machine offspring, the future is very hard to predict. I would not be surprised if the entire solar system was being converted into clouds of computronium or femto-technology in the next couple of centuries. But then again, most past predictions of the future have been hopelessly wrong so what do I know.

[madd0ct0r]

what the fuck - all of the larger animals are onyl being kept alive by human assistance?

dude, you smoking something.

left alone, most species will rebound really fucking fast. A more realistic worry is over population accidently destroying habitats before stabalising (see elephants post ivory ban)

[Aaron MkII]

how many more years for the baby boomers to die off?

Too bloody many.

What the hell dudes? My parents are boomers, lets not lump all of them into the same pile and wish for the death of millions of people.

Jesus.

[madd0ct0r]

i'm not wishing for it, but major change won't happen until the pig in the pipe is bacon, and even then it's going to be a struggle to convince people.

[Aaron MkII]

Somehow I suspect that the major opposition is and will be big business, they already piss and moan over anything that costs a few bucks.

But hey, remember how attitudes towards smoking have been changed over the last thirty years? Lets try it with the enviroment.

[cosmicalstorm]

what the fuck - all of the larger animals are onyl being kept alive by human assistance?

dude, you smoking something.

left alone, most species will rebound really fucking fast. A more realistic worry is over population accidently destroying habitats before stabalising (see elephants post ivory ban)

Are you replying to me?

Most species of large animals are already dangerously close to the lower limits of genetic diversity, even if we leave them all alone right now and magic away all human interference with their natural habitats, some will likely be extinct over the next couple of centuries.
If we continue expanding our population and continue our interference with nature, it's probably just a few decades until most of the natural big game is gone.
Keep in mind, we are living right in the middle of the Holocene Extinction event, and we have not seen anything so far that indicates it's "done", instead, it's ongoing and running at a faster pace for every year that is passing.

[Aaron MkII]

What are you defining as large animals?

Deer for example aren't in danger but Polar Bears will likely be gone by the time my grandchildren have kids.

[Pendleton]

What are you defining as large animals?

Deer for example aren't in danger but Polar Bears will likely be gone by the time my grandchildren have kids.

Which type of deer? We've already made plenty of deer species extinct, so your comment is false. It's like saying frogs aren't going extinct, despite there being mountains of evidence of a great many amphibians being on the borderline of extinction, and not even particularly exotic varieties.

If it doesn't serve our species any real purpose, it is at threat of going extinct or close to it. It's that simple. Either we stop growing and consuming, or they fight back somehow. I think it's obvious which way this is going. The idea that this can't happen is just as much an appeal to incredulity as the AGW denialists saying humans can't affect the global climate. It is happening, and it's happening fast.

I also dislike the ratting on "baby boomers". We're ALL to blame, so don't do the human thing of finding a convenient scapegoat that you can vent your ire against. Look in the mirror.

[Aaron MkII]

White tails but yes I realize my statement was to broad, I apologize.

I'd love to leave my children a better world, just like my parents wanted to. Unfortunately that runs right into that hard wall of people just not giving a shit.

[Ultonius]

There has been some success in reintroducing endangered species to the wild. The European bison, for example, has gone from a population of under 50, all in zoos, in the late 1920s, to a population of 3000, including free-ranging herds, one as big as 800 animals, across Eastern Europe as well as Kyrgyzstan and Spain, with plans to create more herds in the Netherlands and Germany. Just last week, seven bison were taken to the Danish island of Bornholm, where they will be released into the wild in a few years.

[Pendleton]

I wouldn't say I'm against conservation, but the idea that we can save all the species (or, rather, all the ones pretty enough to warrant public attention) is naïve human hubris. While we have the ability to ravage whole ecosystems, we're not quite omnipotent enough to save all life on Earth, or even a good fraction of it. Well over 90% of it has gone extinct in the past, and we're making a damn good attempt at carrying on that trend.