Is the world being destroyed?

A new United Nations report released Wednesday shows farming, mining, and logging has marred more than half of the planet. In a portrait of land degradation across the globe, the report describes entire forests razed for timber or pasture; sensitive grasslands and wetlands lost to sprawling cities; and over-exploited lands that have dried up into desert.

People have altered 70 percent of Earth’s lands from their natural state and degraded up to 40 percent. This threatens “many species on Earth, including our own,” the report warns. If these trends continue, experts expect growing disruptions to human health, food supplies, migration, and biodiversity loss driven by climate change, in what the authors calls a “confluence of unprecedented crises.”

“The human-environment relationship must drastically change to avoid catastrophic tipping points whereby the human power of exploitation is overwhelmed by the power of nature,” the report says, noting that half of humanity already feels the effects of degraded land.

The report, called the Global Land Outlook 2, comes from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and follows a landmark UN report earlier this month that called for “rapid and deep” emissions cuts to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The authors stressed that combating the erosion of the world’s lands actually makes a lot of economic sense: More than half of the global economy — about $44 trillion a year — relies on the natural world. At the same time, restoring lands and protecting forests could stem the rippling effects of poverty, hunger, conflict, and disease. And that, in turn, could contribute more than a third of the efforts needed to sequester carbon and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

More than anything, industrial agriculture has played an outsized role. The cultivation of cattle, palm oil, and soybeans in particular has led to depleted freshwater, widespread deforestation, and rampant extinctions, all of it underwritten by $700 billion in government subsidies each year that support unsustainable, polluting practices. In turn, this has unleashed tons and tons of greenhouse gasses each year.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the U.N. organization, said that for too long, people have mined the earth, used its resources, and thoughtlessly discarded the rest. He pointed to his suit jacket: “This is fiber, this is cotton, this is land, this is water, this is carbon.” Thiaw said humanity must abandon this approach and adopt a more sustainable mindset of management.

The report warns that if nothing changes, by 2050, we can expect significant hits to crop yields, the degradation of an additional expanse of land the size of South America, and the loss of carbon locked up in poor soils and threatened peatlands. On the other hand, committing to conservation and restoring about a third of the world’s lands would not only improve yields and lock in carbon, but also prevent a third of expected extinctions.

The authors used “restoration” to refer to sustainable management of land and water. That includes practices like “rewilding” natural areas, protecting wetlands and waterways, prioritizing ecosystems in agriculture, and building green spaces in cities. They pointed to a number of success stories, such as efforts to rewild Argentina’s Iberá wetlands and prepare for dust storms in Kuwait.

“It’s not complicated,” Thiaw said. “It is actually low-tech, and it is accessible and achievable.” That is, if humanity can muster up the political will.

At first, the scientists chose a straightforward title for their research: “Marine Extinction Risk From Climate Warming.”

But as publication approached, something nagged at them. Their findings illustrated two drastically different outcomes for ocean life over the next three centuries depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions were sharply curbed or continued apace. Somehow it seemed the study’s name conjured only doom.

“We were about to send it in and I thought, ‘Gee, it sounds like a title that only has the dark side of the result,’” said Curtis Deutsch, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University who studies how climate change affects the ocean. “Not the bright side.”

So he and his co-author, Justin L. Penn, added an important word they hoped would highlight their finding that the grim scenario outlined by their results could still be, well, avoided.

On Thursday they published “Avoiding Ocean Mass Extinction From Climate Warming” in Science. It is the latest research that crystallizes the powerful yet paralyzed moment in which humanity finds itself. The choices made today regarding greenhouse gas emissions stand to affect the very future of life on Earth, even though the worst impacts may still feel far away.

Under the high emissions scenario that the scientists modeled, in which pollution from the burning of fossil fuels continues to climb, warming would trigger ocean species loss by 2300 that was on par with the five mass extinctions in Earth’s past. The last of those wiped out the dinosaurs.

“It wasn’t an ‘Aha’ moment per se,” said Dr. Penn, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, recalling the first time he looked at a graph comparing those past extinctions with their grim forecast. “It was more of an ‘Oh my God’ moment.”

On the other hand, reining in emissions to keep within the upper limit of the Paris climate agreement would reduce ocean extinction risks by more than 70 percent, the scientists found. In that scenario, climate change would claim about 4 percent of species by the end of this century, at which point warming would stop.

“Our choices have huge impacts,” Dr. Deutsch said.

While there is broad consensus that a shift away from coal and expanded wind and solar energy make the worst-case scenario unlikely, oil and gas use continues to increase and the world is not on track to meet the lower-emissions scenario modeled by the scientists.

The new study builds on Dr. Deutsch and Dr. Penn’s earlier work: creating a computer simulation that detailed the worst extinction in Earth’s history some 252 million years ago. Often called “the Great Dying,” it claimed more than 90 percent of species in the oceans. The cause was global warming, triggered by volcanic eruptions. The oceans lost oxygen, and fish succumbed to heat stress, asphyxiation or both. The computer model found more extinctions at the poles as compared with the tropics, and the fossil record confirmed it.

To forecast the effects from global warming that is now driven by human activity, the scientists used the same model, with its intricate interplay between sunlight, clouds, ocean and air currents, and other forces like the chemical dances between heat and oxygen, water and air. They also took into account how much fish habitats could shift, estimating thresholds for survivability.

“It’s a lot of time spent on the computer,” Dr. Penn said.

While the study focused on the effects of warming and oxygen loss, ocean acidification and other snowball effects could worsen the species loss it predicted.

The ocean has long acted as a quiet safeguard against climate change, absorbing vast amounts of the carbon dioxide and trapped heat as people burned fossil fuels and razed forests. But that service has come at a cost. Last year, the ocean reached its highest temperature and lowest oxygen content since humans started keeping track. Changes to the ocean’s chemistry are already threatening fish. Coral reefs are in steep decline.

“‘How screwed are we?’ I get that all the time,” Dr. Deutsch said. “If we don’t do anything, we’re screwed.”

It’s the last day of April, 2022 and Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is quickly approaching. With it, heatwaves, hurricanes, fires and the La Nina driven mega-drought will continue their onslaught. The melt season in the Arctic is just getting started, with the possibility of a new low reminding us again of the inevitability of a blue ocean event. Siberian fires are burning out of control due to Russian firefighters being sent to Ukraine to commit genocide. Nuclear war is being openly discussed in the mainstream media. India is suffering through its earliest and longest Spring heatwave in 122 years. Lake Mead in the Western US, the source of water for millions, is going bone dry.

Methane has peaked for the year at around 1911 ppb, up a record 19 ppb over last year. Meanwhile, CO2 just surpassed 422 ppm for the first time in a daily NOAA reading (this happened on April 26, for the mathematically minded, too bad it wasn’t April 22), a level that hasn’t been seen in over 4 million years. And then there’s this stunning headline from yesterday in The Guardian, “Global heating risks most cataclysmic extinction of marine life in 250 million years.” Digging in, there are dozens of other stories to look at, from the insect apocalypse and crop failures to floods in Eastern Australia and South Africa to famine in West Africa to a global pandemic (did you forget about that?). But you get the point, this is not going to end well for humanity or the planet. We are living every day with growing existential threats, as pretty much everything falls to sh*t, everywhere, all at once.

Buddhism describes compassion as the heart that trembles in the face of suffering. It is the willingness to bear the pain and suffering of others and to selflessly help alleviate this condition wherever it appears.

I am not compassionate. I am selfish and entitled. I have a stocked refrigerator and pantry, comfortable home and a gas guzzling car waiting to transport me to wherever I feel like going in the moment. I have two children and four grandchildren, that’s six more humans on the planet (all of whom I love, of course) with their first-world carbon footprints. I eat at local restaurants and enjoy local parks several times a week. My smart phone, my Netflix/Amazon/Hulu subscriptions that I watch on my smart TV, and my computer keep me entertained. I can avoid the contradictions by a quick click over to a 1980’s sitcom or funny video about cats. I have been living like a King my whole life. And so have you.

We in the first world have been living like Kings for generations, with the Sword of Damocles hanging in plain view. Humanity didn’t blow up the planet in nuclear holocaust in the 1950’s or 60’s. We didn’t all die from cancer due to nuclear plant meltdowns or from scalding solar radiation after the ozone was depleted. Humanity survived lead paint and leaded gasoline, oil spills, air pollution, acid rain, rivers on fire and DDT. Our comfort endured through the Savings and Loan scandal, as well as various housing bubbles, depressions, recessions and financial crashes. We made it through world wars, regional wars, political divisions, nationalism, fascism and genocide. We survived the atom bomb being dropped. Twice. But now the rope has been cut and the sword is falling full speed at all of us.

Climate change, with all of its feedback loops and tipping points already set in motion, is not a human construct. It is not something we can just stop doing by changing our habits, laws or political systems. It is not a chemical or a bomb or a currency. Climate change is not a new policy or social order. Climate change is a falling sword and gravity is one of the fundamental forces shaping the universe. It comes down to simple physics.

The great 20-th century poet Dylan Thomas brilliantly described our impossible relationship to the natural world in this verse:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The sixth great extinction is a natural process, we can’t change it any more than we can change the course of nature through the seasons. All of the yelling, screaming and protesting we do won’t change the fortune of one single flower. It’s Spring in the Northern Hemisphere and a brutal summer lies ahead. The flowers will bloom and fade. All that’s left is to bear witness as best we can.

I tell myself that the three pillars of compassion I preach — service, generosity and kindness — are good enough. They are ways of being in the world that directly helps others with their pain and suffering as doom mounts — a triad to manifest compassion as directed action. But right now I don’t feel compassionate. It’s fake. At this moment I hate humanity.

I hate what we’ve done to this beautiful planet, the nature we’ve destroyed in the name of materialism and comfort. I hate that the beauty humanity has produced in its arts, science, literature and culture is not sufficient to cover up the ugliness in its politics, exploitation and consumerism. I hate that the wisdom of homo sapiens was not wise enough to overcome the selfish greed that evolution imbued in every cell of every one of us. I hate that I am no better than this.

I am ready for a planet rid of humanity.

This sad sphere that we have willfully ruined through generations of walking in our genetic footprint is in its final days. The pain and suffering ahead will dwarf anything humanity has experienced in its long ugly past. There are nearly 8 billion of us suffering together on the planet today, but there is no Buddha, no Christ, no Mohammed, no Krishna, no Avengers and no Davos-elite to save us. There is no master plan behind the chaotic mess befalling us. There is only that damn sword accelerating towards us and nothing we can do to stop it.

These sorts of essays are supposed to end with hope, or at the very least some sort of call to action. I should be telling you what you can do to make a difference. But I’ve come up empty. You can’t make a difference any more. The choice I’ve made for today is to donate several hours of time to a local non-profit whose cause is one I support, schlepping boxes and setting up tables. It’s just a matter of passing the time in a way that makes me feel like I’m compassionate, like I’m a good person doing good deeds. In truth, it’s just another way for me to be selfish.

In just a few short years none of this will be here. Society will crumble, civilization will collapse and the sixth great mass extinction will take its course. I only hope that on the other side of this catastrophic collapse, nothing like humanity ever evolves again on this tired and abused space rock.

A new report shows that U.S. plastic recycling rates have declined from about 8.7% to between 5% and 6%, revealing the challenges and shortcomings of the country’s waste management infrastructure and policies.

Environmental organizations Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics issued the report, which found a decline in recycling rates since 2018, the last time the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the rates. According to the report, per capita plastic waste generation has increased 263% since 1980, totaling 218 pounds of plastic waste per person as of 2018.

At first glance, it may seem the lower recycling rates could express a declining interest in participation by the public. The plastics industry has been pushing for recycling, despite criticism to stop producing as much virgin plastic to begin with.

In reality, recycling is a complicated process and is not a sustainable solution to the skyrocketing amount of plastics being made. The declining recycling rate also aligns with decreasing plastic waste exports, as countries like China and Turkey ban waste imports from the U.S., Reuters reported.

“The plastics industry must stop lying to the public about plastics recycling. It does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that. Instead, we need consumer brand companies and governments to adopt policies that reduce the production, usage, and disposal of plastics,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator, said in a press release.

Plastic recycling is far less successful than recycling of other materials. Paper recycling rates are around 66% as of 2020. Glass recycling rates are just over 30%, and cardboard recycling dipped slightly in 2020 to 88.8%. Metal recycling rates depend on the type of metal but range from 27% to 76%. Only plastic recycling rates have failed to go past 10%, even before other countries implemented bans on waste imports from the U.S. and waste considered ‘recycled’ was shipped elsewhere.

“There is no circular economy of plastics,” said Jan Dell, founder of The Last Beach Cleanup. “Plastics and products companies co-opted the success of other material recycling and America’s desire to recycle to create the myth that plastic is recyclable.”

The report comes at a time when California Attorney General Rob Bonta has launched an investigation into petrochemical and fossil fuel companies, beginning with a subpoena for ExxonMobil. The investigation is to determine whether ExxonMobil and others in the industry lied to the public about plastic recycling efficacy and the impacts of plastic.

The authors of the report hope it sheds light on the inefficiency and unsustainable nature of plastics and plastic recycling to inspire better, widespread policies moving forward.

When a plant root pushes into soil, it triggers an explosion of activity in billions of bacteria.
Photograph: Liz McBurney/The Guardian

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While no solution is a panacea, I believe that some of the components of a new global food system – one that is more resilient, more distributed, more diverse and more sustainable – are falling into place. If it happens, it will be built on our new knowledge of the most neglected of major ecosystems: the soil. It could resolve the greatest of all dilemmas: how to feed ourselves without destroying the living systems on which we depend. The future is underground.

April 26, 2022, NEW YORK/GENEVA – Human activity and behaviour is contributing to an increasing number of disasters across the world, putting millions of lives and every social and economic gain in danger, warns a new UN report.

The Global Assessment Report (GAR2022), released by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) ahead of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in May, reveals that between 350 and 500 medium- to large-scale disasters took place every year over the past two decades. The number of disaster events is projected to reach 560 a year – or 1.5 disasters a day – by 2030.

The GAR2022 blames these disasters on a broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility,” which leads to policy, finance and development decisions that exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and put people in danger.

“The world needs to do more to incorporate disaster risk in how we live, build and invest, which is setting humanity on a spiral of self-destruction,” said Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, who presented the report at the UN headquarters in New York.

“We must turn our collective complacency to action. Together we can slow the rate of preventable disasters as we work to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals for everyone, everywhere.”

The report entitled “Our World at Risk: Transforming Governance for a Resilient Future,” found that the implementation of disaster risk reduction strategies, as called for in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, had reduced both the number of people impacted and killed by disasters in the last decade.

However, the scale and intensity of disasters are increasing, with more people killed or affected by disasters in the last five years than in the previous five.

Disasters disproportionately impact developing countries, which lose an average of one percent of GDP a year to disasters, compared to 0.1-0.3 per cent in developed countries. The highest cost is borne by the Asia-Pacific region, which loses an average 1.6 percent of GDP to disasters every year, while the poorest also suffer the most within developing countries.

Adding to the long term impacts of disasters is the lack of insurance to aid in recovery efforts to build back better. Since 1980, just 40 percent of disaster-related losses were insured while insurance coverage rates in developing countries were often below 10 percent, and sometimes close to zero, the report said.

“Disasters can be prevented, but only if countries invest the time and resources to understand and reduce their risks,” said Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head of UNDRR.

“By deliberately ignoring risk and failing to integrate it in decision making, the world is effectively bankrolling its own destruction. Critical sectors, from government to development and financial services, must urgently rethink how they perceive and address disaster risk.”

A growing area of risk is around more extreme weather events as a result of climate change. GAR2022 builds on the calls to accelerate adaptation efforts made at COP26 by showcasing how policymakers can climate-proof development and investments. This includes reforming national budget planning to consider risk and uncertainty, while also reconfiguring legal and financial systems to incentivize risk reduction. It also offers examples that countries can learn from, such as Costa Rica’s innovative carbon tax on fuel launched in 1997, which helped to reverse deforestation, a major driver of disaster risks, while benefiting the economy. In 2018, 98 percent of the electricity in Costa Rica came from renewable energy sources.

GAR2022 was drafted by a group of experts from around the world as a reflection of the various areas of expertise required to understand and reduce complex risks. The findings of the report will feed into the Midterm Review of the implementation of the Sendai Framework, which includes national consultations and reviews of how countries are performing against the goal, targets and priorities for action of the Sendai Framework.

“As the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework is underway, this report should be a wake-up call that countries need to accelerate action across the Framework’s four priorities to stop the spiral of increasing disasters,” said Mizutori

“The good news is that human decisions are the largest contributors to disaster risk, so we have the power to substantially reduce the threats posed to humanity, and especially the most vulnerable among us.”

In February 2022, a Dutch-owned fishing trawler released a silvery stream of 100,000 dead fish, which carpeted several thousand square metres of ocean off the coast of France. The vessel’s owners blamed the discharge on a faulty net. Environmental groups alleged that the fish were intentionally dumped.

Whatever the truth, that spectacle of squandered sea life was the tip of the iceberg: figures from WWF show that in 2019, at least 230,000 tonnes of fish were dumped in EU waters. Most of the waste – 92% – is related to bottom-trawling, a fishing method that scrapes the seafloor, indiscriminately scooping up everything in its path.

But this figure is a small fraction of an even larger global issue. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 35% of all fish, crustaceans and molluscs harvested from oceans, lakes and fish farms are wasted or lost before they ever reach a plate.

Fish are highly perishable and fragile, which makes them more vulnerable to waste, a problem that is compounded by haemorrhaging fish at every step of the supply chain. Fish waste is especially shocking, says Pete Pearson, senior director for food waste at WWF, because they “are wild animals, so we are harvesting wildlife”.

Fish populations are already threatened by overfishing, pollution, and the climate crisis. With current rates of fish consumption projected to double by 2050, waste is increasingly on the radar of regulators. “We have to do something about it,” says Omar Peñarubia, a fisheries officer at the FAO.
Infographic showing levels of fish wasted globally.

That begins, experts say, with understanding exactly what is driving waste between harvest and plate. The task is made difficult by fisheries’ notoriously opaque supply chains, and incomplete datasets that are also inconsistent, although the evidence is clear that most fish waste starts at the point of extraction.

Just under half of all fish consumed by people is wild-caught at sea. “There’s such abundance that we’ve grown to be OK with certain loss rates,” Pearson says, although noting that 34% of global marine stocks are now overfished. Bycatch (unintentionally caught, unwanted fish) is a growing problem, too: roughly 10% of wild-caught fish are discarded worldwide each year, representing 8.6m tonnes of animals. The main culprits are imprecise fishing gear and policies that allow fishers to discard non-target species.

There’s an economic driver, too. “I think there is a strong connection between subsidies and waste in the water,” says Rashid Sumaila, professor of ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia.

Although subsidies were historically devised to support small-scale fishers, today 80% of $35.4bn (£26.4bn) in annual fishing subsidies goes to a handful of industrial fleets, Sumaila’s research shows. These include gargantuan bottom trawlers that are uniquely equipped to travel out to the high seas and overfish, leading to discards on an industrial scale.

The impact of illegal and unreported fishing is also important, says Sumaila, as it is likely contributing tonnes more bycatch to global fish waste.
Food for 3 billion people

Fish waste is about more than just the physical loss of fish: for the 3 billion people whose diets depend on fish, it is a lost nutritional opportunity.

“The narrative is that we have to produce more to feed the growing masses, but the greatest pathway to [increasing] supply is reducing loss and waste,” says Shakuntala Thilsted, global lead for nutrition and public health at World Fish and winner of the 2021 World Food Prize.

Many see controlled aquaculture systems (or “fish farms”) – which generate more than half our fish supply – as a solution to the waste of wild fishing. But Dave Love, senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, says that various factors, such as disease, are driving considerable losses on farms, too. “Mortality in fish ponds is actually a significant source of lost potential food,” Love says.

Fish waste continues after harvest – though how it unfolds differs depending on location. The FAO estimates that 27% of all fish globally is lost or wasted after landing, but in low-income countries the fish is more likely to be unintentionally lost than wasted, says Peñarubia.

One study showed that in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Togo, 65% of lost fish on land was attributable to poor handling, lack of storage and cooling facilities on fishing vessels and along the lengthy supply chain.

Fish disappear after distribution, too, but here the culprits are retailers and consumers, almost exclusively in middle-and high-income countries. In North America, Oceania and Europe, fish waste at consumption far outstrips that of any other region in the world.

Pearson thinks retailers in the US partly contribute to the problem by prioritising large, fresh fish to sell at a premium, which quickly spoil. “This is the real tragedy, because it’s moved all the way through the supply chain, and then we’re comfortable with a 10% to 30% loss rate in the grocery store,” he says.

When retailers prioritise fresh fish, “the ripple effect is that consumers are more likely to waste that in their homes,” says Love, who published research showing that retailers were responsible for about 16% of wasted seafood in the US, while up to 63% comes down to consumers putting uneaten fish in the bin.
Go frozen?

Solutions do exist to reduce fish spoilage along the supply chain. Increasing access to cold-chain technologies in low-income countries, along with methods such as solar-powered drying tents, could extend the shelf life of fish. Fishers and processors also need training on better fish handling and storage to limit loss, Peñarubia says.

At the consumer end, Pearson and Love argue that we should encourage more people to opt for frozen fish, which could reduce demand for fresh fish in grocery stores, and limit the amount that is lost in retail and people’s homes.

Thilsted suggests diversifying our appetites beyond the ubiquitous fish fillet to smaller fish and bivalves, which can be consumed whole to reduce waste. “If our notion of ‘fish’ is a fillet on a pan, then we are already far down the path of loss and waste, because we have reduced the edible part to such a small portion of the whole.”

Existing fish byproducts can be captured and turned into new ones. Fish heads, fins, and bones from the fishing industry are already a source of fertiliser and feed; now innovators are finding uses for everything from fish skin for burn treatments, and crustacean waste to make biodegradable packaging.

“The idea of full utilisation is something that needs to be pervasive across all food supply chains” says Pearson, who cautions, however, that we shouldn’t overstate these solutions. Unless fish byproducts replace a share of fish demand, they are simply making use of waste – not reducing it at source.
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Ultimately, prevention is the best solution, starting at sea, where this problem begins, Pearson says. Fishers need to be equipped with more selective gear for fishing, and aided by policies that discourage discards. Sumaila underscores the need for “good subsidies” that can be channelled towards fisheries that help replenish wild stocks: “We need to spend taxpayers’ money in ways that reinforce positive feedback from people to nature, and nature to people,” he says.

For generations we’ve believed “the ocean is huge, and we can just take whatever we want,” says Pearson. “Now we’re coming to see the limits of that. And when you have limits, it requires you to become more efficient.”

The world is at “boiling point” and humanity needs to redefine its relationship with nature if it is to address a web of crises, from rising prices to extreme heat and floods, according to a report released ahead of a landmark UN conference.

The research from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Council on Energy Environment and Water says the solutions to the interlinked planetary and inequality crisis exist, but calls for “bold science-based decision-making” to “completely rethink our way of living,”.

“In many ways, the world is at boiling point – with extreme temperatures in south Asia, escalating fuel and food prices, and war and conflict,” said Åsa Persson, research director at SEI. “In our report, we seek to connect the big picture of intertwined planetary and inequality crises with the promising momentum for change that we see in public awareness and key technologies, to shift from urgency to agency”

The report is published ahead of a UN meeting, Stockholm 50, which marks 50 years since the pivotal environment gathering in the Swedish capital in 1972.

It argues that although all the ingredients for change exist – from growing public support for structural change to accelerating clean technology – there has been a stark lack of action.

It says transformative change can happen by making sustainable lifestyles the easy and preferred choice for people and communities and by promoting business models that focus on services delivered, not products made.

“The ample opportunities for policymakers to take action and the growing momentum for change gives me hope,” said Nina Weitz, from SEI. “We see how public opinion reflects the urgency and willingness to change lifestyles, how youth worldwide demand and exercise more agency to fight climate change, environmental degradation and inequity and that technological development and uptake is occurring faster than anticipated.”

The report’s recommendations include:

• Replacing GDP as the single metric to measure progress and instead focus on indicators that take “inclusive wealth” and the caring economy into account.
• Establishing a regular UN forum on sustainable lifestyles.
• A global campaign on nature-based education for children.
•Transforming people’s everyday relationship with nature by integrating it in cities; protecting animal welfare and shifting to more plant-based diets. It also says policymakers should draw on indigenous local knowledge.
The report calls for improved co-ordination between states to tackle ecological and other crisis and stronger accountability for those failing to act.

“Countries, companies and citizens have to be held accountable for their actions and their inaction,” it states. “We need new imaginative mechanisms for nurturing constructive accountability, which incentivises and leads to bold action and change.”

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment established a framework for action and set a global agenda for humans and the environment, with heads of state committing to protect and promote human and environmental health and well-being.

Organisers say next month’s Stockholm 50 conference aims to act as a springboard for the UN’s “decade of action” and help deliver on pledges made on climate change, biodiversity and the adoption of green post-Covid-19 recovery plans.