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1. The North American Regional Assessment was carried out in order to characterize the priority environmental issues, states and trends in the region in a systematic, evidence-based manner, as input into the sixth iteration of UNEP’s Flagship Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-6) process.
2. Experts and government representatives identified regional priorities for North America at the Regional Environmental Information Network (REIN) conference held in Ottawa-Gatineau, 27-29 May 2015. These regional priorities have been used, in part, to inform and guide this regional assessment. This document provides a summary of key findings and policy messages emerging from the assessment.
3. Environmental conditions in North America have significantly improved over time due to investments in policies, institutions, data collection and assessment, and regulatory frameworks. However, in recent years environmental challenges have emerged that are proving harder to manage within existing policy frameworks. These challenges are the result of interactions across complex systems involving multiple pressures. They pose risks to human wellbeing and ecosystems that are novel in form and magnitude. Approaches to managing these problems that reduce systemic risk and steer sustainable transformations have emerged, generating evidence of their potential to respond to these new challenges.
Conditions have improved because of effective policies.
4. Air quality continues to improve in the region in response to concerted policy action in both countries and favorable trends in technology and energy markets. Regional, national, and local efforts to improve air quality are having substantial, measurable, and important public health benefits which have an estimated value on the order of $2 trillion. However, the improvements in air quality are not evenly distributed, with approximately 140 million people exposed to pollution above regulatory thresholds.
5. Legislation enacted in the early 1970s in North America has led to effective control of point sources of pollution to surface waters and delivery of safe drinking water to most communities in the region. However, legacy, persistent and emerging contamination continues to put pressure on water quality in some areas. In particular, diffuse sources of water pollutants, such as nutrients, remain a challenge.
6. Drinking water quality is generally extremely good, but shows signs of backsliding in some areas. Negative trends are chiefly the result of degraded infrastructure and weak governance. These isolated water quality incidents threaten human health, in some cases acutely.
7. North America’s land resources are generally in good shape. A rich network of well-managed protected areas is in place and is helping to conserve biological diversity. Large-scale disruptive land use and land cover changes are kept in check by effective governance policies and regulations. However, natural landscapes are becoming more fragmented in some areas in response to both natural causes, such as wildfires and pest outbreaks, and decisions about land management activities, ownership transfers to heirs, and development, particularly at the intersection of the forest, agriculture, and energy sectors.
8. While progress has been made with many individual species, much biodiversity is at risk in North America. with increasing pressures from land use change, invasive species, climate change, and pollution affecting species, both on land and in the coastal marine environment. However, regulatory approaches aimed at habitat protection show promise and biodiversity science is very advanced in the region. Continued efforts to integrate traditional ecological knowledge will further benefit conservation efforts.
9. Chemicals and waste show mixed trends. Issues arising from those that have been subject to policy focus over the past decades are declining significantly. Other sources, however, such as ash residue from coal scrubbers, abandoned mines, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics, are increasing and pose threats to human health and ecosystems.
In recent years environmental challenges have emerged that are proving harder to manage within existing policy frameworks.
10. Climate change is generating impacts across the region that affects diverse aspects of the environment as well as human health and well-being and, in some cases, human security. The potential for these impacts to worsen in both the near and long term is a priority issue for the region. However, the administrations of both countries are taking steps to mitigate impacts and adapt to those that are unavoidable. The US and Canada have agreed the two countries will play leadership role internationally in the low carbon global economy over the coming decades, including through science-based steps to protect the Arctic and its peoples, as well as, working together to implement the historic Paris Agreement.
11. The Arctic is an area of special concern because climate change impacts are most pronounced in the high latitudes and the risk of further significant change in the near term is growing. The Arctic’s unique social, institutional, and ecological patterns make it highly vulnerable to continued climate change, especially in light of the difficulties it faces with regard to adaptation, which will trigger cascading risks.
12. The energy system is undergoing rapid changes, providing challenges and opportunities. Challenges arise from the externalities associated with aggressive hydrocarbon extraction methods. These externalities include the potential for increased air emissions, water use and induced seismicity. However, ongoing trends in renewable energy, rising efficiencies, and energy storage technologies are driving opportunities and demonstrating the potential to achieve a sustainable energy system.
13. New chemical contaminants and new sources of traditional pollutants are manifesting as emerging air and water quality problems that are of concern for public health and the environment.
14. Water scarcity is of increasing concern in the region. Water demand exceeds sustainable supply in the arid western areas of North America resulting in mining of aquifers, fragmentation and regulation of most western rivers through dams, and vulnerability of urban and rural communities to drought. Depletion of groundwater is exacerbated by a lack of groundwater governance mechanisms. Long-term droughts have accelerated water scarcity problems in some parts of the region, and climate change has most likely contributed to the severity, extent and duration of these droughts.
15. The coastal and marine environment is under increasing threat in the region, both from harmful trends regarding some traditional environmental pressures such as nutrient loads, as well as new pressures such as ocean acidification, ocean warming, sea level rise, and novel forms of marine debris.
16. Freshwater fisheries are well-regulated in the Great Lakes region and are generally controlled across North America, but face challenges due to factors such as climate change, population pressure, and pollution.
Solutions to environmental challenges in the region are emerging.
17. Efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sequestration are beginning to show tangible results and to create a foundation for potentially major advances. Mitigation successes derive from a wide range of measures across the federal, regional and local levels of government and across the public and private sectors, including energy efficiency product standards; low-carbon electricity generation; transportation plans; building codes and standards; and other efforts. The December 2015 Paris climate agreement created a mechanism for all countries to coordinate national efforts and set more ambitious targets moving forward.
18. At the same time, governments, business and communities are taking action to adapt to climate change. For instance, Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) in 2008 as part of the City’s long-term sustainability plan. The NPCC engages scientists who study climate change and its impact, as well as legal, insurance, and risk management experts. The results of the panel’s work offers examples for other communities to examine their own vulnerabilities and opportunities to enhance their capacities and resilience. Greater attention is also being given to strengthening and protecting green infrastructure.
19. Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) provides important tools to integrate natural resource, environmental, economic and social information to address systemic challenges faced by governments, [land and resource] managers, businesses and the public. NCA integrates this information into an accounts framework that is regularly updated to track transactions, identify trade-offs and reveal choices. It also helps to track and evaluate [program and policy] implementation and will reveal many of the unintended consequences of addressing complex systemic challenges. NCA is being implemented at three levels: national, ecosystem and enterprise. At the national level, water, energy and pollution accounts can be used to understand and improve resource use efficiency, inform allocation of scarce resources (for example, water) and reduce pollution. NCA ecosystem accounts provide a framework that managers can use to identify and track all types of ecosystem services, including regulating, supporting and cultural services, where valuation is a challenge. NCA also provides a framework to identify beneficiaries. Private sector early adopters are using NCA approaches to improve resource use efficiency, manage risks and reduce pollution.
20. Sustainable Consumption and Production brings together wide-ranging options for reducing environmental pressures by addressing drivers associated with manufacturing processes and consumer demand. These options have the potential to alleviate systemic pressure on the environment across the board, as demonstrated through successful innovations in areas such as water conservation, green building, reduction of packaging waste, and green procurement.
21. We find in the region evidence of heightened interest in approaches to adaptive governance that blend insights from disparatestrands of innovation to create a repertoire of action that is enabling progress on the most difficult aspects of the sustainability challenge. This repertoire combines elements that have been on the policy agenda for some time, such as multi-stakeholder policy processes, with new ideas borrowed from resilience, inclusive governance, and system innovation. Progress at the sub-national and transnational levels on a variety of issues is ahead of bilateral federal collaboration.
22. North America is an energetic driver of the Data Revolution, with many proven examples of using environmental informatics and analytics to drive progress and many promising innovations under active development. These innovations combine commitments to regularly updated resource inventories and censuses with breakthroughs in sensor technology; open data practices; mobilization of diverse data communities; social science understanding of how information can drive effective responses; and quantum enhancements in networked information systems to contribute to a rapidly expanding set of responses to environmental challenges in the region.
The outlook for North America is a mixture of emerging possibilities and problems.
23. Advances in science and technology and systemic transformations offer hope for a more sustainable future.
24. Technological change regarding data and analytics is moving as fast as, if not faster than, the problems that concern the region, bringing with it the promise to harness the power of the data revolution to manage these problems.
25. Many technical and policy innovations that have been incubating for decades are starting to bear fruit or have advanced to the point where major adoption is within reach, and these innovations offer the promise of systemic transformation that could help reverse negative trends.
26. A few North American cities and smaller communities are serving as living laboratories, demonstrating how focused attention on pragmatic, coordinated improvements in systems spanning land use, transportation, public health, clean energy and water, and enhanced recycling and waste management can bend the curve toward enhanced resilience and sustainability to improve quality-oflife and lower social costs. Spreading these lessons learned to other communities throughout North America offers hope for creating more sustainable and resilient development pathways to the future. However, persistent environmental challenges remain.
27. Many pressures are worsening, leading to deeper uncertainties and complexities faster than policy responses are able to keep up.
28. Even for pressures that are moving in the right direction, such as carbon intensity, the magnitude of improvement is not adequate to meet mounting challenges.
29. A wide range of potentially catastrophic impacts are built in to the near and medium term climate, so that climate change impacts are highly likely to increase regardless of how fast the region reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and how fast it supports global emissions reductions. The consequences for human lives and livelihoods will depend on measures to adapt to climate change and increase resilience that, while showing signs of promise, are not yet sufficient to meet the threats. The region has been surprised by the emergence of major failures in traditional environmental issues such as drinking water safety, suggesting that past successes are in jeopardy.
