Lecturas Sobre Derecho del Medio Ambiente. Tomo XIX

Environmental law or environmental law faces challenges of greater scale and difficulty every day; The Geo6 report, "Healthy Planet, Healthy People", released within the framework of the Fourth United Nations Environment Assembly, calls for the International Community and society in general to effectively address the environmental challenges of the present in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and other internationally agreed goals, such as, for example, those defined through the Paris Agreement (UNEP, 2019).

The aforementioned report shows that an unhealthy planet results in sick people, and that the evidence collected proves that we are indeed facing an environmental crisis of extraordinary proportions. Some facts that validate this statement are: the serious loss of biodiversity, climate change, atmospheric and water pollution, ocean depletion, and change in land use, factors that must be urgently resolved. GEO6 illustrates in detail the social and economic costs associated with this phenomenon by noting that exposure to contaminated air and water claims nine million lives a year, the annual price of pollution is estimated at US$4.6 trillion, and there is a significant process of species extinction (42% of terrestrial invertebrates, 34% of freshwater invertebrates and 25% of marine invertebrates) that endangers planetary integrity (UNEP, 2019).

Thus, according to UNEP, if we continue to fail to comply with the international commitments that have been defined to achieve the protection of nature, if the environmental goals defined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are not achieved, nor the internationally agreed environmental goals for 2050 , if we continue to demonstrate our inability to take urgent action, it will generate negative and potentially irreversible consequences for essential environmental resources and human health.