Despite a growing planetary crisis, leaders find hope in community efforts

Another major scientific warning about the planet’s accelerating decline landed this week, and once again, the numbers are sobering. Released at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi, the seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) depicts a world facing intensifying climate shocks, rapid biodiversity loss, expanding land degradation and pollution levels now responsible for 9 million premature deaths each year.

It adds to a growing chorus of assessments urging faster, deeper action to avoid crossing catastrophic environmental tipping points. The report arrives in a moment crowded with dire alarms: studies on wetlands, emissions, tipping points, chemical pollution and collapsing biodiversity; UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report showing adaptation finance falling as climate impacts deepen; and new research warning that climate misinformation is turning a global crisis into a governance breakdown.

Combined with greenwashing and political hostility toward science in many countries, finding hope can sometimes feel like an uphill task. And yet GEO-7 does contain it. It shows that even as the planet edges toward danger, pockets of progress are emerging — from shifts in energy and food systems to restoration efforts and rising momentum for circular economies.

“The environment is changing — not just climate change, but loss of biodiversity, pollution, land degradation. So, all of these issues are getting worse,” Robert Watson, a co-chair of GEO-7 and former chair of the IPCC, told Mongabay in Nairobi. These crises, he said, are inseparable: “They are all interconnected and must be addressed together.” A coal power plant operating at night in the nickel industrial...This article was originally published on Mongabay