The rate of environmental damage is increasing across the planet, but there is still time to reverse worst impacts if governments act now, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) says in its new assessment reports.

 

Released ahead of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), convening today in Nairobi, Kenya, UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-6): Regional Assessments, provide highly detailed examinations of the environmental issues affecting each of the world's six regions: the Pan-European region, North America, Asia and the Pacific, West Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa. The six regional assessment reports will inform the Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), which will be released before 2018 and will provide the most authoritative assessment of the state, trends and outlook of the global environment.

 

The Regional Assessments show that environmental change sweeping the world is occurring at a faster pace than previously thought, making it imperative that governments act now to reverse the damage being done to the planet.

They conclude that the world shares a host of common environmental threats that are rapidly intensifying in many parts of the world.

 

In almost every region, population growth, rapid urbanization, rising levels of consumption, desertification, land degradation and climate change have combined to leave countries suffering from severe water scarcity. These worrying trends are also making it increasingly hard for the world to feed itself, warn the reports, which involved 1,203 scientists, hundreds of scientific institutions and more than 160 governments.

 

Across the world, climate change, the loss of biodiversity, land degradation and water scarcity are growing problems that need to be urgently addressed if the world is to achieve the goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the reports state.

 

The Executive Director of UNEP, Achim Steiner, said: " With these assessments, UNEP has presented the world with the very latest evidence on the state of the world's environment, providing them with the tools they need anticipate and avoid the damage that is being done to our planet.

 

"It is essential that we understand the pace of environmental change that is upon us and that we start to work with nature instead of against it to tackle the array of environmental threats that face us."

 

Talking at the periodic meeting of High Level Group (HLG), which provides policy guidance on GEO-6 report, Najib Saab, secretary general of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), said: "Guidance provided by any supervisory group, whatever level it might be, reaches nowhere without qualified authors who have adequate expertise. The Secretariat raised the need to train authors on how to write assessments. Some need simply to be taught how to write, which does not fall under UNEP mandate. Selection of report authors should be placed under strict scrutiny, following highest academic and publishing standards. Mediocre quality should not be an option."

 

 

 

A rise in the amount of degraded land and the spread of desertification are having profound economic and environmental impacts on the Arab region, the UNEP report on the region states. The region is suffering from an increase in water demand, overexploitation of groundwater resources and deteriorating water quality, as well as unsustainable patterns of consumption that threaten the region's ability to secure its sources of food, water and energy.

 

The scarcity of the region's renewable water resources also poses a major challenge in the region, denting its ability to produce enough food to meet the growing population's needs. High population growth and rolling conflicts mean that the carrying capacity of the land has become too low to support people with freshwater and food, the report says.

 

Water demand in the region is increasing while water quality is deteriorating. Ground water resources are being overexploited. As a result, only four out of 12 countries in West Asia are above the water scarcity limit of 1000 cubic metres per person per year.

 

Continuous conflict and the mass displacement of people throughout the region are also triggering severe environmental impacts that are endangering the health of people. Heavy metals from explosive munitions and radiation from missiles have leached into the environment as a result of the region's conflicts. The 2.97 million refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq are placing an immense environmental burden on the region, producing about 1,440 tonnes of waste per day in 2015, overwhelming governments and increasing the risk of disease outbreaks.

 

The top environmental risk factors for human health in the region are air pollution; lack of access to safe water and adequate sanitation; climate change; exposure to hazardous chemicals and wastes; emergencies and disasters; and exposure to radiation.

 

In the West Asia region, more than 229,500 people die prematurely each year because of specific environmental risks and 8.24 million healthy life years are being lost because of these risks. This means every individual in the West Asia region is losing 17 days of life annually because of modifiable environmental risk factors.

 

Almost 90 per cent of municipal solid waste in West Asia is disposed of in unlined landfill sites and leachate from these is contaminating scarce groundwater resources.

 

Rising populations, urbanization, economic growth, burning of fossil fuels and conflict all place enormous stress on the environment and harm human health. It is estimated that air pollution alone, which has increased steadily over the past two decades, was responsible for more than 70,000 premature deaths in West Asia in 2010.

 

Other top issues in the region are climate change, which will exacerbate water stress in the region, and biodiversity, which is under threat from urban expansion, pollution, the overconsumption of biological resources and changes in habitat.

 

 

This year, hundreds of key decision makers, businesses and representatives of intergovernmental organizations and civil society gather at the second United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2), today in Nairobi, for one of the first major meetings since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Agreement. The resolutions passed at UNEA-2 will set the stage for early action on implementation of the 2030 Agenda, driving the world towards a better, more-just future.

 

UNEA-2 also gave Major Groups and Stakeholders the opportunity to come together on Saturday and Sunday, prior to Monday’s assembly, to engage in a multi-stakeholders setting that also includes policymakers, learning from each other, developing partnerships and creating their input into UNEA-2.