Governments must impose radical limits on everything from water use to greenhouse gases if they want to have any chance of ending global poverty, a group of scientists said.
States needed to tighten clean air laws, at least halve the amount of water drawn from river basins and start cutting some environmentally damaging pollution, all by 2030, they suggested.
“The stable functioning of Earth systems - including the atmosphere, oceans, forests, waterways, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles - is a pre-requisite for a thriving global society,” the Australian-led team wrote in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.
The report was meant to feed into discussions at the United Nations this week on drawing up new targets to take over from the global body’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which are due to expire in 2015.
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