LONDON - Two decades after a landmark report sounded alarm bells about the state of the planet and called for urgent action to change direction, the world is still in dire straits, a U.N. agency said on Thursday.
While the U.N. Environment Programme's fourth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4) says action has been successfully taken in some regions and on some problems, the overall picture is one of sloth and neglect.
"The global trends on climate, on ozone, on indeed ecosystem degradation, fisheries, in the oceans, water supplies ... are still pointing downwards," UNEP head Achim Steiner said in a short film accompanying the report's release.
The 540-page report calls for emissions of climate warming greenhouse gases to be cut by between 60 and 80 percent, and notes that 60 percent of the world's ecosystems have been degraded and are still being used unsustainably.
"We are facing an escalating situation. Partly because we have been very slow in reversing the degradation that we have documented and secondly because the demands on our planet have continued to grow during this period," Steiner said.
"That equation cannot hold for much longer. Indeed, in parts of the world it is no longer holding," he added.
The report is a litany of planet-wide death and degradation.
Two decades after former Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland warned that the survival of humankind was at stake, GEO-4 finds that three million people die needlessly each year from water-borne diseases in developing nations -- mostly children under five.
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Fishing capacity is nearly four times more than is sustainable, species are becoming extinct 100 times faster than fossil records show, and 12 percent of birds, 23 percent of mammals and over 30 percent of amphibians face extinction.
