The world is in front of three urgent crises, UN report warns.

UN offers a science-based blueprint to tackle the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and pollution. “For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature”, Secretary-General António Guterres told a virtual press briefing on the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.

Let’s look at some of the things that the report concern about:

• UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Health Organization have said the root cause of pandemics is the destruction of the natural world.
• Earth is on the way to an additional 1.9C warming from now, far more than the internationally agreed-upon goals in the Paris accord.
• About nine million people a year die from pollution.
• About one million of Earth’s eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction.
• Up to 400 million tonnes of heavy metals, toxic sludge, and other industrial waste are dumped into the world’s waters every year.
• More than three billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15 percent of Earth’s wetlands remain intact.
• About 60 percent of fish stocks are fished at the maximum levels. There are more than 400 oxygen-depleted “dead zones” and marine plastics pollution has increased tenfold since 1980.

According to the UNEP report, the world can tackle the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises together. Carbon emissions need to be taxed, and trillions of dollars of “perverse” subsidies for fossil fuels and destructive farming must be diverted to green energy and food production, the report says.