UN’s new GEO-7 report calls for a complete economic transformation — and invites us to imagine the world we could still create.
Read the report here if you like:
https://www.unep.org/geo/global-environment-outlook-7
When the United Nations releases a Global Environment Outlook, the world is meant to take notice. The latest one — GEO-7, more than 1,200 pages long and created by hundreds of scientists across disciplines — is not a gentle document. It does not soothe, and it does not flatter. It delivers a single, unsettling truth:
Nothing in the global environment is moving in the right direction.
GEO-7 is the most comprehensive environmental “health check” humanity has ever received. It examines climate, biodiversity, pollution, land degradation, freshwater decline, and material use — not separately, but as one interconnected crisis. And when you see the whole picture at once, the conclusion becomes unavoidable:
Humanity has destabilized the very systems that make life possible.
Yet the report does something even more important than document the damage.
It points directly at the cause.
And it says the quiet part out loud.
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The System Itself Is the Problem
For the first time in a UN environmental assessment of this scale, the authors state clearly:
Humanity cannot solve these crises within the current economic system.
A systemic transformation is required.
This is not activist rhetoric.
It is the institutional voice of global science.
GEO-7 lays it out plainly: We are trying to preserve a living planet using an economic logic designed for extraction, competition, short-term survival and endless material expansion. It worked while the world was large and humanity was small. But now we realize the world is finite and humanity is enormous — consuming at a level the Earth cannot regenerate. We have already entered deep ecological overshoot: using the equivalent of multiple planets’ worth of resources every year, drawing down forests, soils, oceans and biodiversity faster than they can rebuild themselves. In other words, we are living on borrowed time from ecosystems that can no longer keep up with the demands of an outdated economic system.
Our system rewards destruction because destruction is profitable.
It treats nature as “free” until it collapses.
It externalizes costs until they come back as disaster.
The report is diplomatic, but the meaning is blunt:
The global economy is structurally misaligned with the continuation of life.
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Robert Watson: “It Costs More to Be Passive Than to Act.”
One of GEO-7’s leading contributors, world-renowned scientist Robert Watson, summarized the situation with sharp clarity:
“It costs more to be passive than to act.”
GEO-7 estimates that deep global transitions — energy, food, materials, waste, transport — would save humanity thousands of billions of dollars, eventually rising to tens of trillions in avoided damages.
Think about that:
The greatest financial savings in human history are found in not destroying our home.
And Watson goes further: only a new economic system — one that values planetary stability, regeneration and long-term wellbeing — can prevent collapse. Incremental fixes won’t work. Price adjustments won’t work. Technological substitution won’t work without systemic redesign.
This is the part of the report that should be printed in bold, underlined, and taped to every parliament door:
We are not choosing between “expensive action” and “cheap inaction.”
We are choosing between investment and ruin —
and ultimately, between the life and death of our planet.
Because if we fail to act, the costs won’t just be financial.
They will be existential.
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But Here Is the Real Question:
What Does Acting in Time Actually Look Like for our future?
Reports diagnose.
Policies prescribe.
Economists calculate.
But humanity also needs something else:
A vision.
Because we are not only facing an environmental crisis.
We are facing an imagination crisis.
We know what failure looks like.
But what does global success feel like?
What does a world look like where we truly acted in time?
A world where:
• collaboration replaced competition,
• regeneration replaced extraction,
• shared inheritance replaced private hoarding,
• and value was measured in life, not currency?
This is where science reaches its limit — and story begins.
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A Glimpse Into a World Where Humanity Chose Another Path
In the novel Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, I explore a future set about one hundred years after we finally did what the GEO-7 scientists are begging us to do today.
It is a world where humanity ultimately realized:
If the economic system is killing us, the only logical solution is to create a new one.
But the world of Waking Up goes one step further — the step no scientific report dares to make:
Humanity discovered that the most efficient, regenerative, fair and intelligent economic system was… no money at all.
Because when all resources are declared the shared inheritance of all people,
when technology handles abundance and distribution,
when wellbeing replaces profit as the guiding principle…
then the greatest savings of all become obvious:
We saved not thousands of billions.
Not trillions.
But an infinite amount of money — by abolishing money itself.
You cannot spend money that no longer exists.
You cannot misallocate resources when everything is shared.
You cannot bankrupt a planet when its systems are aligned with nature instead of against it.
In the world of Waking Up, humanity didn’t just cut costs.
Humanity ended the concept of cost itself.
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Why This Vision Matters Now
GEO-7 gives us the clearest scientific warning ever issued.
It tells us what will happen if we continue down this path.
It tells us what we could save if we change course.
But reports alone do not inspire transformation.
They cannot show us how it feels to live in a world healed from fear and scarcity.
For that, we need imagination.
We need courage.
We need stories that reveal the contours of a future worth fighting for.
Because between the data and the dream, a new world waits.
And every transformation in human history began first as an idea.
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If you want to experience a world where humanity acted in time —
and saved the greatest amount of money by making money obsolete —
you can step into that world HERE.
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