Nairobi—More bad news, people. The (fourth) Global Environment Outlook has just been published by the UN. It’s an epic, 450-page tome, five years and 1,500 experts in the making. Their worldwide gaze looks every catastrophe you can imagine square in the face.

GEO 4 was released with simultaneous hullabaloo in New York, Nairobi and London, so chances are we’ll be hearing different takes on it for the next week or two. At least let’s hope so. It follows in the tradition of the 1987 Brundtland Commission’s, “Our Common Future,” a document famous in environmental circles for being the first global stocktaking of its kind.

Twenty years on, as the diplomatic Executive Director of the UN Environment Program Achim Steiner noted, “Brundtland’s recommendations remain a challenge.” Indeed. Half a million Asians are dying prematurely from air pollution each year; Africa is eroding in some spots at a rate of thirty metres a year into the sea; sixty percent of the Caribbean’s coral reefs are dying; a quarter of Latin America is in the process of becoming a desert, while the aquatic equivalent – eutrophication – is choking nearly half the big estuaries in the US. For its part, Canada gets special mention for having three of the world’s top ten urban sprawls, which will come as no surprise to the residents of Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver.

Then again, no one living within sight of a television has much excuse to be surprised by what GEO 4 has to say. And that in itself is a cause for hope. To paraphrase Herr Steiner, the world seems to have reached a tipping point in terms of environmental awareness, particularly on the issue of climate change.

The concept of tipping points is just one of several principles GEO 4 employs to illustrate both ominous environmental trends and positive social reactions. Malcolm Gladwell fans will know, a tipping point is that moment beyond which a certain trend accelerates exponentially – a pattern that well describes the collapse of fish stocks, say, or the warming response of our atmosphere to the pile-up of greenhouse gases. It’s closely linked to that other point, the one of no return. But it doesn’t have to have dire consequences – in humans, some positive examples include the Prague Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, one could argue, the amount of air time the environment has been getting since Hurricane Katrina.

Unfortunately, it’s surpassingly easy to do nothing in the face of dire necessity. Which brings us to another of GEO 4’s principles: Lag time. Lag time is the reason the hole in the ozone layer is currently bigger than it’s ever been, and is unlikely to heal before the end of the century despite a near-global ban on CFC production that went into effect decades ago. A similar concern affects climate change: no one knows how high the temperatures would continue to rise if we stopped producing greenhouse gases instantly, but rise they would. And will. CFCs and greenhouse gases alike take years to make their effects known.

Since the same is true of human policy and industrial change, we might want to pick up the pace. We already have some proof of how effective we can be when spurred by proper urgency; the ban on CFCs, even if it won’t be felt for a while, is truly something to celebrate, as is the eradication of smallpox and polio, or the fact that temperate forests are once again expanding their coverage of the earth’s surface for the first time in centuries.

That said, feel-good stories remain the exception that proves the rule. Meanwhile, billions will soon lack clean drinking water, a third of the ocean’s fish stocks have collapsed, soil fertility is plummeting, human behavior has set in motion the sixth Great Extinction since life began on earth, and all that’s before climate change. Yes, here and there the world has always been about to end, but from one end to the other? There’s no precedent for that, no example to follow. We wish we had big shoes to fill; but as GEO 4 says, our environmental footprint is already at 2.2¹ hectares per person. It looks like it’s time to downsize.

Tags: international, kenya

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Posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 6:56 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.