Over the past three years, 287 experts from 82 countries have embarked on “the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment to date,” as defined by the UN. It is the Global Environmental Outlook report that provides a grim warning about accelerating global warming that has taken the planet into “uncharted territory,” according to the more than 1,100-page document presented Tuesday under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
In addition to being a wake-up call, the publication of this report is an example of the complex context in which humanity and the environmental fight are trapped. Because to accompany this vast document, a political synthesis agreed between scientists and country representatives should have been presented. However, this text was blocked by the oil states allied with the United States, as has already happened several times during this first year of the second term of Donald Trump, denier and defender of the fossil fuel sector.
This is the seventh such assessment, known by the acronym GEO. The first was presented in 1995 and the latest edition, GEO6, was published in 2019. Four renowned personalities were responsible for chairing the committee responsible for its preparation for this occasion, including the British chemist Robert Watson, who, among other things, twice chaired the IPCC (the group of experts which lays the foundations for climate change) and was the scientific advisor to the White House during the era of Barack Obama. “There is no doubt that the Earth’s climate is warming faster than we thought,” he says when asked about the main difference between the findings of the 2019 assessment and those of 2025. “We are probably underestimating the magnitude of climate change,” he warns.
This is explained in the summary prepared by GEO7 scientists on their own initiative: “The rate of global warming will likely be higher than the baseline estimates of previous IPCC projections, increasing the risk of irreversibly exceeding several climate tipping points in the coming decades.
But this study does not only focus on climate change, it also analyzes the three other aspects of the quadruple environmental crisis that the planet is suffering from as a result of human action: loss of biodiversity, soil degradation and desertification, and pollution linked to waste. “These interconnected crises, which undermine human well-being and are mainly caused by unsustainable production and consumption systems, reinforce and compound each other and must be addressed together,” they explain.
The authors further caution that “most internationally agreed or adopted environmental goals and targets are unlikely to be achieved by existing policies and practices.” They refer to pacts like the Paris Agreement of 2015, the Montreal pact of 2022 for the protection of biodiversity or the new guidelines on air pollutants that the World Health Organization (WHO) set in 2021.
The course of current policies is leading humanity to non-compliance with these agreements. For example, GEO7 suggests that warming will increase between 2.4 and 3.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, well above the 1.5 to 2 degrees set by the Paris Agreement as a limit.
But the report also includes what needs to be done to prevent this from happening, that is, the “transformation” that needs to be undertaken and that thousands and thousands of scientific reports have been highlighting for decades. For example, eliminating the enormous sums of public funds intended to support environmentally harmful activities in the energy, food and mining sectors, which amount to $1.5 trillion per year. Or the need to diversify “energy production, in particular by increasing the use of renewable technologies, such as solar and wind energy”, while accelerating the “gradual elimination” of fossil fuels. Or the recommendation to stop taking GDP growth as the sole measure of development, “by including natural capital and human well-being in decision-making”.
Blockade
It is precisely here, in the area of solutions, that the scientists in charge of this report had the most problems due to pressure from petrostates, who last year found in the Trump administration the best ally to put an end to environmental policies focused on fossil fuels.
The preparation of this report is based on the mandate issued in 2022 by the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA). This week, Nairobi hosts a new meeting of this assembly, during which GEO7 will be presented. But the mandate three years ago included not only preparing this assessment, but also agreeing on a policy summary that would help leaders take action and agree on decisions on the environment.
This summary is prepared as part of a negotiation based on scientific documents and with the observations of country representatives. The meeting to draft the document was held in Nairobi in late October, but it ended without agreement. As another of the four presidents of the commission in charge of GEO7, former Costa Rican minister Edgar Gutiérrez-Espeleta, explains to EL PAÍS, a “minority group of countries” ended up blocking the text. Because they objected to mentions of fossil fuels and plastic – another petroleum derivative –; They also rejected the use of the terms “crisis” or “transformation” and even asked to eliminate references to the Sustainable Development Goals, explains the man who is also a professor of statistics at the University of Costa Rica. “Everything was to lower the tone of the report,” he summarizes.
Sources present at these meetings, at which, in addition to negotiators from 67 countries and the European Union, were present dozens of scientific and UN organizations, emphasize that the most bellicose were the representatives of Saudi Arabia and Iran, joined by others such as Russia, Turkey, Argentina and Brazil.
Finally, the final blow for this political document came with the appearance on the last day of a representative from the United States, a country until then absent from all the negotiations. “The United States joined the negotiations on the last day, indicating that it could not support the document,” say UNEP sources involved in the process. The meeting ended up being suspended without this text “for policy makers”, as the documents that accompany all important UN reports and serve as a summary are known. Faced with this situation, scientists decided to prepare their own synthesis.
Gutiérrez-Espeleta explains that he has already participated in the GEO6 process last decade, whose political summary was agreed with the countries, such as GEO5 (2012) and GEO4 (2007). “There were always observations from countries, but with a desire to find a solution,” he recalls. On this occasion, he did not perceive this “good will” among certain negotiators. He connects what happened with this report to other environmental events, such as the recent climate summit in the city of Belém, where the petrostates managed to ensure that the final declaration of the meeting did not include any mention of fossil fuels, despite them being the main causes of global warming.
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