UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme, Inger Andersen, launched the report “Making peace with nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, pollution and biodiversity emergencies”, which is based on evidence from global environmental assessments.
“Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, together with climate change and pollution will undermine our efforts on 80 per cent of assessed SDG Targets, making it even more difficult to report progress on poverty reduction, hunger, health, water, cities and climate,” says Andersen in the Foreword. “We need to look no further than the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, to know that the finely-tuned system of the natural world has been disrupted.”
The resulting synthesis communicates how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. The report serves to translate the current state of scientific knowledge into crisp, clear and digestible facts-based messages that the world can relate to and follow up on. It first provides an Earth diagnosis of current and projected human-induced environmental change, by putting facts and interlinkages in perspective, including by using smart infographics. In building on this diagnosis, the report identifies the shifts needed to close gaps between current actions and those needed to achieve sustainable development. The analysis is anchored in current economic, social and ecological reality and framed by economics and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By synthesizing the latest scientific findings from the global environmental assessments, the report communicates the current status of the world’s urgent issues and opportunities to solve them.