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By Simon Ticehurst Movement and Advocacy Lead
Mexican artist Luis Andrade from Puebla captures the devastation of forest fires, painting with the ashes as the medium.
Climate change, global warming and greenhouse gas emissions have dominated the global conversation about the environment and our relationship to the natural world since the turn of the century. Important as it is to keep global temperatures down to safe levels, this carbon tunnel vision has blinkered many of us from seeing and addressing equally pressing environmental emergencies such as the loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, and pollution and how these are all connected to our economic systems.
When UN general Secretary Guterrez said in 2021 that humanity is waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature, only a few took notice. But as the scale of what the UN calls a triple environmental crisis becomes more evident in our daily lives this is beginning to change.
Storms, wildfires, droughts and record temperatures continued to batter the globe in 2024 and headline news stories. But the wider decline in our ecosystems is as big an emergency, affecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the sustainability of our economies. These should not be seen as separate emergencies, vying for our attention and stressing our capacity and budgets, but as symptoms with the same root causes that need to be addressed systematically.
Politicians around the world still argue that we need to grow the economy, yet given the overuse of resources in everything we produce and consume and the waste and pollution, how we grow the economy today actually drives environmental destruction, overshooting the planet´s biological carrying capacity.
Important multilateral conferences in 2024 around the loss of biodiversity, land degradation and desertification, and plastics pollution have put other planetary boundaries on the map and the world is waking up to a wider, more systemic understanding of our planetary crisis. Everything we do depends on healthy ecosystems.
These issues need to be addressed together, systemically (and not separately as they currently are), since they are all symptoms of a common problem. When we look at the causal factors, we quickly understand the common denominator of our economic systems impacting directly on these dimensions of the planetary crisis.
- Our fossil fuel energy dependency is driving climate change and global warming through continued greenhouse gas emissions;
- our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss, and according to the Convention on Biodiversity accounts for 70% of the projected loss of terrestrial biodiversity;
- Changing land use has led to millions of people facing the impacts of drought, deforestation, with depleted soils, dwindling water resources, and the decline of once-thriving ecosystems, contributing to migration.
- Negotiations on a plastics pollution treaty in Busan, South Korea are trying to address the fact that the world is “drowning in plastics” from the 460 million tons of plastic that we produce each year.
The ecological footprint from our economic growth is becoming uneconomic. The reality of failure demand, understood as having to pay to fix, repair, patch and clean up after the damage is done, is that it is getting more and more expensive to deal with the fall out from our economic growth.
The World Bank has argued that the global economy faces annual losses of $2.7 trillion by 2030 if ecological tipping points are reached and countries fail to invest more in protecting and restoring nature. According to the UN environment program, up to $577 billion in annual global crop production is at risk from pollinator loss. An ocean clean up campaign estimates that marine plastic costs the economy up to 19 billion annually. It would be better (and less costly) to prevent the harm from being done in the first place.
Latin America is in an unusual position to offer leadership in addressing these issues in 2025. Two countries in particular, Colombia and Brazil, are among the world´s most megadiverse countries. Colombia hosted COP 16 on Biodiversity in Cali in 2024 and Brazil will host COP 30 on climate in Belem do Pará, in the Amazon in 2025.
Colombia’s President Petro has often argued for the transition away from fossil fuels, and has signed the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. During the “Peace with Nature” COP on biodiversity in Cali, he argued for a new economic paradigm and the government hosted a parallel economies for life conference, bringing together alternatives from different social movements that aim to respect and sustain nature.
In Brazil, deforestation is slowing again, after reaching new highs under the previous president Bolsonaro, who encouraged further agricultural expansion and mining in the Amazon. Iron ore and soy are Brazil’s major exports (with China the biggest importer) and this continues to impact on environmental decline. But Lula has promised to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. Brazil’s recent leadership of the G20 was also instrumental in establishing global task forces on climate, hunger and poverty.
There is no magic bullet and neither country is free from contradictory policies, facing significant domestic political opposition to these ideas, but both governments increasingly see the purpose of the economy as delivering wellbeing rather than the accumulation of profits. This is something to build on in 2025.
I live in Mérida, close to Chicxulub, the site of the last mass extinction, about 66 million years ago, when a meteorite hit what is now the Yucatán. Many organisations say we are already living in the 6th mass extinction, but unlike previous natural extinction events, this sixth mass extinction is driven by human activity. According to WWF, these include the unsustainable use of land of which 40% has been converted to food production and agriculture is also responsible for 90% of global deforestation and accounts for 70% of the planet’s freshwater use.
Addressing world hunger is a good example of why we need a more systemic approach. We cannot just expand the areas of production (using up more and more land and water). How food is produced is one of the biggest human-caused threats to our ecosystems. WWF argues that about 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted each year—four times the amount needed to feed the more than 800+ million people who are malnourished. The organization argues that by improving efficiency and productivity while reducing waste and shifting consumption patterns, we can produce enough food for everyone without expanding the ecological footprint of food.
A WEAll briefing paper on sustainable food production argues that holistic, regenerative and agroecological models are gaining traction in many countries due to their ability to counteract erosion, water and nutrient loss, CO2 emissions, biodiversity loss (especially insect biomass loss), chemical pollution and desertification that are prevalent in the world’s farmland. Alternatives do exist!
Brazil has already demonstrated at a national level that eradicating hunger is possible with the right public policies and incentives, engaging with family farms and agroecological practices.
Both Brazil and Colombia share the Amazon, and what happens in these countries will be decisive for the conservation and regeneration of what is considered the lungs of the planet, which absorb as much as 25% of atmospheric carbon dioxide and produce 6% of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.
We need to reverse the rate of destruction and deforestation and regenerate our ecosystems. Scientists claim that ecosystem restoration would have the biggest single impact on keeping global temperatures down and capturing CO2 emissions, as well as in restoring biodiversity, soil quality and water retention. It is a systemic solution. Yet ecosystem restoration remains largely unfunded. More investment goes instead towards electric cars, which ironically still demand enormous reserves of finite critical minerals from environmentally sensitive parts of the world.
Recognizing that ecosystems support all life on Earth, the UN launched in 2021 the UN decade for ecosystem restoration to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. Ecosystem restoration at scale in practice is among the most significant contributions to regulating climate change, while reducing flooding and droughts and improving water and air quality, impacting on human and planetary wellbeing.
While regenerating ecosystems, we also need to prevent further harm from being done. Many organisations argue for fiscal reform in which the polluter pays. True cost accounting can also ensure that environmental impacts are recognized. Fiscal incentives and disincentives can be used to encourage the transition toward a wellbeing economy. Several Wellbeing Economy Governments are already adopting wellbeing frameworks. One of these governments, in Wales, adopted the exemplary 2015 legislation of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, whereby public bodies consider the long-term impact of their policy decisions and where the role of a Future Generations Commissioner acts as a guardian of Future Generations with the power to conduct reviews into the extent to which public bodies are safeguarding future generations’ needs.
The Ecocide Law Alliance is campaigning for ecocide (the mass damage and destruction of nature) to be considered a crime before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Making ecocide the fifth crime against peace reflects the understanding that without healthy ecosystems, there can be no peace or human wellbeing. A recent Earth4All and Global Commons Alliance public opinion survey across G20 countries found that 72% of the population surveyed believed that causing environmental damage should be a criminal offence.
All these issues will be playing out along the road from Cali to Belém do Pará. This year, WEAll will be tracking this journey, working with different actors to continue to shift the narrative around the redesign of our economic systems by putting nature at the center.
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