With only six years to go before the end of 2030 for meeting the UNEP Agenda set in 2015 with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is true that global awareness over biodiversity protection has surged, but unfortunately efforts to transform global awareness are lagging behind in terms of speed and scale.
According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), by 2023, three-quarters of the planet’s terrestrial ecosystem and about 66% of the marine environment had been significantly altered by human action.
Over one-third of the world’s land area and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now goal-oriented to crop or livestock production.
Combined with dizzying levels of pollution, natural habitat degradation and biodiversity loss have serious impacts on communities around the world. In 2023, from 100 to 300 million people were at increased risk of flooding and hurricanes given the loss of coastal habitats.
There were examples of efforts to address these threats, many communities improved their reconstruction actions such as Pakistan with the launch of the largest climate initiative in the country’s history or the United Nations with its new ¨Early Warning for All¨ global project.
According to UNEP, clean energy made some progress and although 91% of the world now has access to electricity such a progress has not been fast or inclusive enough. Nevertheless, the number of people with power access ramped up to 675 million since 2015.
Other data pointed to global investment in clean energy reaching near-record levels of USD$1.7 trillion, so renewables now account for over 28% of global electricity, growing by nearly 5%.
But nowadays, 2.3 billion people still depend on coal, kerosene or solid biomass as main cooking fuel, so the lack of clean cooking contributes to nearly 3.7 million premature deaths annually, with women and children being most at risk.
Plus, about 80% of the world’s population with no electricity lives in rural areas, predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Current studies have shown that reaching these clean energy targets will require the world to triple its annual investments by 2030.
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