A baby born today will turn 75 in 2100, and the world she will inherit – if governments don’t act in the next five years – could be 3.9°C hotter, economically shattered, and ravaged by pollution. But there is still a choice, a new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report shows. 

A sustainable, transformative path is still possible with a whole‑of‑government and whole‑of‑society approach, according to the report,  the most comprehensive assessment of the global environment ever undertaken, and the product of 287 multi-disciplinary scientists from 82 countries.

It will require massive investment now that will pay back exponentially, according to UNEP’s 7th Global Environment Outlook (GEO 7), launched this week at the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, and pollution and waste are costing trillions of dollars each year. One million of an estimated eight million species are threatened with extinction, some within decades.

Sustainable future?

“The Global Environment Outlook lays out a simple choice for humanity: continue down the road to a future devastated by climate change, dwindling nature, degraded land and polluted air, or change direction to secure a healthy planet, healthy people and healthy economies. This is no choice at all,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director.

She conceded that transformation will be hard at the launch on Tuesday, but called on all nations “to follow the transformation pathways laid out in the GEO 7 report, and to drive their economies and societies towards a thriving, sustainable future.”

The upfront costs are about $8 trillion annually until 2050 (far more than the $1.3 trillion negotiated currently). But the long-term return is immense. The global macroeconomic benefits start to appear around 2050, grow to $20 trillion a year by 2070, and could boom to $100 trillion per year thereafter.

The human dividend of this best-case scenario is profound. Up to nine million premature deaths could be avoided by 2050 due to decreased pollution, and about 100 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty. 

“The cost of action is far smaller than the cost of inaction. Our message is simple. Time is running out, but the solution is here,” said Prof Ying Wang of Tongji University in China, one of the lead authors.

Current pathway spells disaster 

The other stark future analysed in the report for a child born today is far worse. If governments stick with existing policies and trends, global average temperature is projected to rise by around 3.9°C by 2100, with a more than even chance of crossing 1.5°C in the early 2030s and 2°C in the 2040s. [The 1.5° threshold represents the global warming limit – relative to pre-industrial average temperature – that the 2015 Paris Agreement established as a key goal.]

On this trajectory, climate change alone would knock about 4% off annual global GDP by mid‑century and roughly 20% by the end of it, largely through crop failures, heat stress, floods and productivity losses, according to the report. 

Sea level could rise by up to two metres in the worst-case scenario, while the economic cost of health damage from pollution-related mortality is projected to increase to between $18-25 trillion by 2060. 

Those numbers sit atop an already dangerous baseline. Human activity has driven greenhouse gas emissions up by about 1.5 % each year since 1990, hitting a record high in 2024, while between 20 and 40 % of the world’s land is now degraded. 

Pollution, especially air pollution, is now “the world’s largest risk factor for disease and premature death”, with health damages from air pollution alone valued at around $8.1 trillion in 2019, about  6 % of global GDP. 

GEO 7 is a scientific assessment and guidance for governments, the private sector, and communities. It sets targets over the next few years and decades on the basis that climate change is an economic, health and ethical issue, not only an environmental one.

Rethinking economies

The report’s core recommendations centre on rethinking how economies measure success. This includes moving away from GDP as the sole metric and adopting broader “inclusive wealth” metrics that track human and natural capital – from clean air and healthy soils to education and public health.

Scientists behind GEO 7 stress that the decisive window is closing fast. To stick to the 1.5°C limit (currently about 1.4 °) in practice means global emissions must peak by 2025 and fall sharply – by about 40 % – by 2030. 

But current national climate pledges fall far short of that, with emissions in 2030 expected to remain close to today’s levels even if governments implement their plans in full.

Each additional fraction of a degree increases the intensity of heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms, along with knock‑on effects on food security, disease spread and mental health. 

To change course, the report calls for nothing less than a rewiring of how economies measure success and how societies consume.  

That shift in accounting, the authors argue, must be backed by hard policy. This involves phasing out and repurposing subsidies that encourage fossil fuel use and other environmentally harmful activities.

It means pricing pollution and other “negative externalities” so that the health and ecosystem costs of coal power, for example, show up in energy bills.

Public and private finance needs to be redirected to clean energy, ecosystem restoration, resilient infrastructure and universal access to basic services. 

These measures are framed not only as climate and nature policy, but as public health interventions that cut exposure to dirty air, unsafe water and toxic chemicals.

“We can no longer support the idea of ‘make money, make money, make money now, and I don’t care what’s happening later’,” says Prof Edgar E. Gutiérrez‑Espeleta, a lead author of GEO‑7 and former Minister of Environment and Energy in Costa Rica. “The main message to businesses is: yes, you can make a good business if you think in a sustainable way.”

GEO 7’s blueprint revolves around transforming five interconnected systems: economy and finance, materials and waste, energy, food and the wider environment. For each, it sets out concrete levers. 

In materials and waste, that means designing products for durability and repair, improving traceability, building markets for recycled materials and shifting consumption patterns towards reuse and sharing. 

In energy, the report calls for rapid decarbonisation of power and fuels, major gains in efficiency, and an explicit focus on energy access and poverty so that the transition does not leave poorer communities behind.

Food systems need to pivot towards healthy and sustainable diets, more efficient and resilient production, lower food loss and waste, and novel proteins that reduce pressure on land and water. 

On the environmental front, GEO‑7 urges accelerated conservation and restoration of ecosystems, greater use of nature‑based solutions to protect communities from floods and heat, and climate adaptation strategies co‑designed with Indigenous and local communities. 

Behaviour- and technology-led climate action

To navigate these shifts, the report models two “transformation pathways”. One is behaviour‑led: societies choose to place less emphasis on material consumption, adopting lower‑carbon lifestyles, travelling differently, using less energy and wasting less food. 

The other is technology‑led: the world relies more heavily on innovation and efficiency – from renewable power and electric mobility to advanced recycling and precision agriculture – while still curbing the most wasteful forms of consumption. 

Both pathways assume “whole‑of‑government” and “whole‑of‑society” approaches, with policies aligned across ministries and meaningful participation by civil society, business, scientists and Indigenous Peoples.

Despite the detailed roadmap, GEO 7’s authors are frank about the gap between their scenarios and today’s politics. At preparatory talks in Nairobi, governments failed to agree on a negotiated summary for policy makers (SPM) amid disputes over fossil fuels, plastics, the circular economy and burden‑sharing.

“There were a number of issues at the meeting in Nairobi that caused difficulty for some countries,” says Sir Robert Watson, a lead author and a former co‑chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Unfortunately, we could not come to an agreement at that meeting for a negotiated summary for policymakers.”

Bleak year for climate action

GEO 7’s call to action comes amid a bleak year for climate action, with the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, rising global emissions, and an underwhelming COP30 in Brazil all signalling stalling momentum to address climate change.

Watson points to the stalled global plastics treaty talks and “limited progress” at recent climate and biodiversity negotiations as signs that governments are “not moving fast enough, by any stretch of the imagination, to become sustainable”. 

Nations, particularly big carbon emitters like the US, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia and Brazil, need to take tough and ambitious climate action immediately. 

It won’t be easy in the current geopolitical climate. The authors know this, but are banking on “visionary” countries and some in the private sector to recognise they will make “more of a profit” by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them. 

“A number of governments, including one very powerful government do not believe in addressing issues such as climate change and loss of biodiversity,” Watson says. 

The irony is stark. Several leaders of the big emitter countries are in their seventies. The decisions they make – or refuse to make – in the next five years will determine whether that baby born today inherits a world of deepening crisis or one where investment in planetary health has begun to pay back by the time she turns 75 in 2100. The question is, what world will she see?

Image Credits: UNEP, AP, UNEP.