A new report from the Britain’s centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) warns politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth.
The IPPR think tank said human impacts had reached a critical stage and threatened to destabilise society and the global economy.
BBC News said that in the report scientists warned of a potentially deadly combination of factors.
These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans.
The IPPR report said these factors were “driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels.
“This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years.”
The IPPR warned that the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes was rapidly closing.
The authors have urged three shifts in political understanding: on the scale and pace of environmental breakdown; the implications for societies; and the subsequent need for transformative change.
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They said that since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.
They acknowledged that at least climate change featured in policy discussions, but other vitally important impacts barely figured.
They pointed out that the top issues being under-played were:
- Topsoil is being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes ?
- Since the mid-20th Century, 30 per cent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion
- 95 per cent of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050
The authors argued that these matters are close to home for British politicians, with the average population sizes of the most threatened species in the United Kingdom having decreased by two-thirds since 1970.
The UK is described as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
Some 2.2 million tonnes of UK topsoil is eroded annually, and more than 17 per cent of arable land showed signs of erosion.
Nearly 85 per cent of fertile peat topsoil in East Anglia has been lost since 1850, with the remainder was at risk of being lost over next 30–60 years.
The IPPR said many scientists believed the world had entered a new era of rapid environmental change.
The report warned: “We define this as the ‘age of environmental breakdown’ to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implications of environmental destabilisation resulting from aggregate human activity.”
Professor Simon Lewis, of Global Change Science at University College London, told BBC News: “IPPR are right to say that environmental change is happening ever-faster and threatens to destabilise society.
“Future problems with food supplies could cause price spikes that drive civil unrest, while increases in levels of migration can strain societies.
“Both together could overload political institutions and global networks of trade.
“This century will be marked by rapid social and environmental change, that is certain. What is less clear is if societies can make wise political choices to avoid disaster in the future.”
Professor Harriet Bulkeley, an expert in geography at Durham University, told BBC News that the IPPR paper was a good interpretation of the current evidence, but she said it raised the question of how firm evidence of environmental threats had to be to prompt government action.
“We know lots of good things to do,” she said, “but often the argument is made that we need to have ‘evidence-based policy’.
“This can, of course, be used as an excuse for delay. So, I guess the question is how much more evidence is needed for action?”
A UK government spokesperson said: “We are committed to leaving our environment in a better state than we found it through our 25 Year Environment Plan and the forthcoming Environment Bill.
“Over 25 years we will replenish depleted soils, rid our seas and rivers of the rubbish trashing our planet, cut greenhouse gas emissions, cleanse our air of toxic pollutants, and develop cleaner, more sustainable energy sources.
“The Environment Bill will also create a new environmental body, the Office for Environmental Protection, to hold us to account on this commitment.”
