Two weeks before the start of a global conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janiero, the United Nations is warning that progress has stalled on key environmental goals the world’s nations have set for themselves, like tackling climate change, combating desertification and protecting biodiversity.
“The world continues to speed down an unsustainable path despite over 500 internationally agreed goals and objectives to support the sustainable management of the environment and improve human well-being,” the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) said when it released its Global Environmental Outlook Wednesday.
The world has made progress on only four out of 90 of the most pressing environmental goals and objectives agreed upon as part of the Millennium Development Goals and other international pacts, the UNEP said.
The four areas where the UN agency found significant progress are:
Reducing substances that deplete the ozone layer.
Removing lead from fuel.
Increasing access to improved water supplies.
Boosting research on ways to reduce pollution of the marine environment.
Little to no progress was made on climate change-related goals such as limiting the increase in average global temperature to less than 2 C above pre-industrial levels or in areas such as revitalization of depleted fish stocks, protection of biodiversity and the combating of desertification.
“The luxury of develop first, clean up later that age, that century is gone,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP executive director.
In some areas, such as wetland and coral reef protection, nations have actually regressed, said the UNEP report, the fifth such overview in 15 years. Coral reefs are at greater risk of extinction than any other living organism and have deteriorated by 38 per cent since 1980, the report found.
Overall, the world is failing to stem the loss of biodiversity, with about 20 per cent of vertebrate species under threat and some natural habitats shrinking by more than 20 per cent since the 1980s.
“We have failed,” said Elizabeth Thompson, executive co-ordinator for the upcmoning Rio conference, dubbed Rio+20. “We have not properly mainstreamed the issue of sustainable development as a way of living, doing business. That is the overall reason why we have not made the kind of progress that we should have.”
The world has made some progress in granting protected status to parks and other natural sites but still remains short of the goal set for 2020, which aims to see 17 per cent of the world’s land and 10 per cent of its marine area protected. Currently, only 13 per cent of land and 1.6 per cent of marine area is protected.
CBC 2012