By: John Gibbons

 “Imagine a world in which environmental change threatens people’s health, physical security, material needs and social cohesion. This is a world beset by increasingly intense and frequent storms, and by rising sea levels. Some people experience extensive flooding, while others endure intense droughts”.

“Species extinction occurs at rates never before witnessed. Safe water is increasingly limited, hindering economic activity. Land degradation endangers the lives of millions of people. This is the world today”.

You could be forgiven for thinking the above is yet another gloomy analysis of the climate from some fringe ‘green’ group. You would, however, be wrong. This is from the introduction to the recently published United Nations document ‘Global Environmental Outlook’ – or Geo-4, as it’s better known.

It’s a massive document, running to nearly 600 pages, and involves direct input from over a thousand leading climate and environmental scientists. The science may be complex, but the message is abundantly simple: Earth is in deep crisis.

Climate change is just one of a range of serious threats the planet and all of us who live here are facing. Water shortages, environmental degradation, the alarming loss of biodiversity and the rapid and permanent destruction of natural habitats combine to place the planet in its most perilous moment in tens of millions of years.

In the words of the UN Secretary General: “This assault on the global environment risks undermining the many advances human society has made in recent decades. It is undercutting our fight against poverty. It could even come to jeopardise international peace and security”.

What is even more astonishing is the “remarkable lack of urgency”, in the words of the authors of Geo-4, in the world response to this crisis. The publication of this massive document coincides with the 20th anniversary of the UN held its landmark World Commission on Environment and Development back in 1987.

So what’s happened in the intervening 20 years? While Ireland has changed almost beyond recognition in this period, worldwide even more profound changes have been accelerating. In 1987, world population was five billion. Twenty years later, it has rocketed to 6.7 billion. In human terms, that’s the same as adding another Ireland to the world’s population every two weeks for the last two decades.

And all these extra mouths to feed have placed huge pressures on the planet as a whole and on all other forms of life on earth. While the global economy has expanded enormously in the last 20 years, driven by globalization, improved communications and increased consumption, the price of this frenzy of activity is being paid by the earth itself.

Geo-4 gloomily predicts that 1.8 billion people will face critical water shortages by 2025, and it points out that three quarters of the world’s marine fisheries are already exploited to and beyond their limits. The world’s commercial fisheries are predicted to have been effectively wiped out by 2050. Today, some two billion people directly depend on fisheries for the bulk of their food, so this collapse will mean widespread famine.

Back on land, farming has, in the last few decades, become more and more productive, and crop yields have increased dramatically to keep pace with growing human demand for food. But this too has been at a price: intensive farming practices have severely damaged huge areas of land, leading to erosion, pollution and desertification.

The heavy use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides has increased the damage. Many forms of modern agriculture, such as cotton or beef production are extremely water-intensive. Much of this is being tapped from large natural aquifers beneath the ground. These are being rapidly drained, and once emptied, they will remain empty.

As man’s needs and demands grow, so vast areas of natural forest and wetlands supporting huge numbers of species has been destroyed by being converted to agriculture. Much of this land is not suitable for intensive agriculture, and so, in a matter of years, lush forests are being turned into barren deserts.

And while humanity grapples with the paradox of ‘sustainable development’ even darker clouds are gathering. Climate change is now “visible and unequivocal”, according to the Geo-4 report. Right now, we are seeing the early warning signs of radical shifts in climate patterns.

Some, such as milder winters in Ireland, may seem harmless, even welcome, but these chaotic temperatures are already causing havoc for animals and plants who rely on weather signals to control critical functions, such as when to migrate, hatch eggs or hibernate.

Rapidly rising global temperatures are causing dramatic retreats of glaciers, rising sea levels and disturbing evidence of serious melting even on vast ice banks in Greenland and Western Antarctica that scientists until recently thought would be stable for centuries.

Our best hope for stabilizing the planet’s temperature before runaway heating becomes unstoppable lies in the plants and microbes in the soil and in the oceans which regulate natural systems. But instead, the Geo-4 report cautions that we are destroying the very creatures and systems that offer us our best and only real long-term chance of heading off a climate-driven global catastrophe.