UNEP Frontiers report: Emerging issues of environmental concern

The UNEP Frontiers report highlights emerging issues of global concern and solutions for effective and timely response. Issues reported are ones that emerge as a result of new scientific findings or others that are persistent and for which new approaches and technologies have appeared.

This publication emphasises the critical relationship between a healthy environment and healthy people. The UNEP Frontiers 2016 edition presents six emerging issues, including:

• Zoonoses -diseases that can be passed on between animals and humans-  (p. 26)
  • Ecosystem integrity can help regulate diseases by supporting a diversity of speciess so that is more difficult for one pathogen to spread rapidly or dominate.
  • Zoonoses can also be tackled though interventions involving the livestock hosts of the disease pathogen.
  • Investment in surveillance and in human and animal health services are needed to ensure 'emergence events' do not lead to large-scale zoonoses epidemics.
• Climate Change (p. 48)
  • Risk transfer is a practice of formally or informally redistributing the risk of financial consequences for particular negative events.
  • Risk retention refers to approaches that allow a country to "self-insure" against climate stressors by means of its own social, economic, cultural, and other resources.
  • Establishing financial reserves to cushion the unexpected financial consequences from climate change impacts help repair the damage, and help societies recover from losses.