The United Nations has urged global governments to invest in the environment in order to drive GDP growth and give the planet a chance to halt the pace of global warming.

The call comes as the organisation issued a new report it described as the most comprehensive assessment of the global environment ever undertaken.

It concluded investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and hunger.

The Global Environment Outlook, Seventh Edition: A Future We Choose (GEO-7), was released at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, is the product of 287 multi-disciplinary scientists from 82 countries.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report warned that climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, and pollution and waste have taken a heavy toll on the planet, people and economies – already costing trillions of dollars each year. Following current development pathways will only intensify this toll.

However, whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches to transform the systems of economy and finance, materials and waste, energy, food and the environment would deliver global macroeconomic benefits that could reach $20 trillion per year by 2070 and continue growing.

“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.

“And let us not forgot the world has already made so much progress: from global deals covering climate change, nature, land and biodiversity, and pollution and waste, to real-world change in the booming renewables industry, global coverage of protected areas, and the phasing out of toxic chemicals,” she added. “I call on all nations to build on this progress, invest in planetary health and drive their economies towards a thriving, sustainable future.”

The report presented two transformation pathways, looking at behavioural changes to place less emphasis on material consumption, and changes in which the world relies primarily on technological development and efficiency gains.

The pathways predict that the global macroeconomic benefits will start to appear in 2050, grow to $20 trillion per year by 2070 and boom thereafter to $100 trillion per year. The pathways project reduced exposure to climate risks, reduced biodiversity loss by 2030 and an increase in natural lands.

It added nine million premature deaths can be avoided by 2050, through measures such as cutting air pollution. By 2050, almost 200 million people could be lifted out of undernourishment and over 100 million people out of extreme poverty.

However, to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and ensure adequate funding for conserving and restoring biodiversity, annual investment of around $8 trillion is needed until 2050. “However, the cost of inaction is far higher,” it warned.

Drawing on multiple sources, the report also details the current and future consequences of business-as-usual development models.

“Greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 1.5 per cent each year since 1990, reaching a new high in 2024 – raising global temperatures and intensifying climate impacts,” it explained. “The cost of extreme weather events attributed to climate change over the last 20 years is estimated at $143 billion annually.

“Between 20 and 40 per cent of land area worldwide is estimated to be degraded, affecting over three billion people, while one million of an estimated eight million species are threatened with extinction.

“Nine million deaths are attributable annually to some form of pollution. The economic cost of health damages from air pollution alone was about US$8.1 trillion in 2019 – or around 6.1 per cent of global GDP.”

It continued: “The state of the environment will dramatically worsen if the world continues to power economies under a business-as-usual pathway. Without action, global mean temperature rise is likely to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s, exceed 2.0°C by the 2040s and keep climbing.

“On this path, climate change would cut 4 per cent off annual global GDP by 2050 and 20 per cent by the end of the century.”