Cross-cutting issues

GEO-6 identifies three key socioeconomic systems with far-reaching environmental impacts: the food, energy and waste systems (well established). These systems are closely interlinked. The processes of producing, distributing and using both food and energy, and materials in general, generates significant waste. These processes and the waste they generate pollute the environment. They also impact biodiversity and ecosystems. Transformative change in these systems will require policy coherence and synergies implicitly addressing issues related to air and freshwater quality, land and soil degradation, oceans and coast integrity, and biodiversity loss. ﹛Chapter 17, ExecSum, 17.3.2, 17.4.3, 17.5.1﹜

Food

The current food system is inadequately providing nourishment to millions of people in the world, while it is responsible for major diet-related diseases in millions of others (well established). Over 800 million people are undernourished and more than 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. Patterns of inequity in access to food correspond to other social inequities, including those based on gender, age, class and the marginalization of racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, 39 per cent of the global adult population (1.9 billion people) is overweight and 13 per cent (650 million people) is obese (World Health Organization [WHO] 2018a). Diet-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease are globally pervasive and, especially in rich countries, associated with overconsumption of saturated fats and processed foods. These diseases are becoming increasingly prevalent in LMICs as animal protein, and products high in fats and sugars, become more widely available and affordable. ﹛4.4.3﹜

Demand for food from land and the sea is growing, with impacts on the planet and human health. Feeding a growing population of 9-10 billion by 2050, in the context of climate change and without making environmental degradation and social problems worse, is a key challenge (well established). Current land and ocean management and food production practices cannot achieve this goal and also prevent the loss of natural capital, preserve ecosystem services, combat climate change, address energy and water security, and promote gender and social equality (established but incomplete). (SDG 12) The proportion of the global population living in low-income food-deficit countries (LIFDCs) rose from 72 per cent in 1965 to 80 per cent in 2005.

GEO-6 identifies five drivers affecting the health of the planet. The trends in human population and demographics combined with economic development, and the growth of consumption that this can enable, have been acknowledged for many decades as the primary drivers of environmental change (well established). More recently, rapid urbanization, accelerating technological innovation, and climate change have been identified as additional drivers. There are wide disparities globally in the consumption and production patterns linked to those drivers. ﹛2.1.1, 2.2; SPM, p. 6﹜

Population Dynamics

The global population in 2018 was 7.5 billion, with median projections estimating an increase to nearly 10 billion by 2050 and nearly 11 billion by 2100 (well established). Increases in life expectancy, and reductions in infant and other mortality, mean population growth rates will remain positive in all regions except Europe and certain parts of Asia. Unequal access to education (Figure 2.1) and lack of empowerment of women, as well as women's lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services, all contribute to high birth rates. ﹛2.3﹜

Population growth is expected to be highest in countries that are very poor, have a low carbon footprint per capita, and have high gender inequity in terms of access to education, work, and sexual and reproductive rights and health services (well established). ﹛2.1, 2.3, 2.3.4, 2.1.1; SPM, p. 6﹜ Such countries also have a low carbon footprint per capita (well established). ﹛Chapter 2, ExecSum, 2.1, 2.3.1, 2.3.2; Co-Chairs’ Message﹜

Population growth will remain important in countries experiencing an early or late demographic dividend (most middle-income and upper middle-income countries) (Figure 2.2). These are also the countries that are projected to have the highest increases in carbon footprints per capita and in environmental footprints more broadly. ﹛Chapter 2, ExecSum, 2.3.1﹜

The world population will become older on average (including in the global South), will become more urban, and will live in smaller households (well established). The trend of rapid urbanization is mainly in the global South.

Economic Development

Economic development has lifted billions of people out of poverty and improved access to health and education in most regions of the world (well established). Although income levels in developing countries lag behind those of developed countries, growth rates in the former are now outstripping growth rates in the developed world (Figure 2.3) and the welfare of large numbers of people is improving.

The sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6): Healthy Planet, Healthy People, was launched in March 2019 at the fourth UN Environment Assembly. This voluminous report focuses on the multiple pathways through which a healthy planet supports healthy people and conversely on the risks for human health posed by the fast deteriorating health of the planet. Among the long list of ongoing damage to life and heath from air pollution, water pollution and land degradation, the report warned that zoonosis is already 60 per cent of all infectious disease and that a pandemic could occur.

Since late 2019, the spread of COVID 19 worldwide demonstrates the enormous challenges such a pandemic can cause for both the health care system and the economy, and the difficult choices facing policy makers between these priorities. Even if such choices are for the short-term, which is by no means clear, these are hard, painful and very expensive choices. We hope that, in investing in the recovery process, states and other stakeholders will consider how such painful challenges could be avoided in the future.

In this Technical Summary of GEO-6 we have distilled the science and data in that report and synthesized the information to make it more accessible to policymakers, students and scientists, and, we hope, more useful both for teaching and learning at the university level, and for policy makers considering how to address environmental problems as they seek to engender economic recovery.

In producing the Technical Summary we have sought to weave the many and disparate themes of GEO-6 – the knowledge about and interactions across the multitude of processes that take place in air, freshwater, land and soil, oceans and coasts, and biodiversity – into a coherent narrative about the cumulative damage to the global environment and the need to address the underlying drivers and pressures. The message that emerges, as in GEO-6, is the need for urgent and sustained action leading to transformational change, if nature's contributions to people are to be sustained.

We have used confidence terms throughout the text, to provide some context for decision makers, along with references back to sections in the main report (in curly brackets) for readers who wish to find more detailed information about an issue as set out in Section 1.1 in Chapter 1.