The world is barreling toward a cascade of environmental and economic shocks unless governments move far faster to confront the planet’s overlapping crises, according to an assessment from the United Nations Environment Programme released Tuesday.
The seventh edition of the Global Environment Outlook, or GEO-7, warns that climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, and pollution are already reshaping economies and societies — and draining trillions of dollars each year from global output.
Rather than treating these threats as discrete environmental problems, the report urges governments to recognize them as interlinked pressures hitting every region.