Now don’t get me wrong. Models are useful. But that use is limited. In recent months a particular claim has begun to circulate in the media and policy circles: that the way we currently produce food and burn fossil fuels is inflicting around $5 billion of environmental damage every hour, adding up to some $45 trillion a year.
My source is the United Nations Environment Programme’s latest Global Environment Outlook, a sprawling, 1,100‑page assessment assembled by hundreds of researchers and diplomats. The report warns that humanity is approaching a point where systemic collapse may become unavoidable unless we transform governance, economics and finance at unprecedented speed and scale.
In what follows I use this report—its statistics, its warnings, and the reactions it triggered—as a case study. My aim is not to dispute the existence of a deepening planetary crisis, but to examine how evidence is turned into narrative, how models shape what we accept as “reality”, and how the biases embedded in such work can both illuminate and distort the futures we’re able to imagine and pursue.
The UN’s Global Environment Outlook report presents itself as an X‑ray of planetary distress. It claims that unsustainable food production and fossil fuel use inflict around $5 billion of environmental harm every hour; that aggregate external damage reaches $45 trillion annually; that shifting course could yield tens of trillions in benefits by the end of the century; and that the window to avoid systemic collapse is narrowing fast. These declarations are already circulating as “facts” in media and policy circles.
Yet when one looks behind the numbers, a very different picture emerges. What appears to be neutral description turns out to be a dense fusion of data, modelling assumptions, political bargaining and civilisational beliefs. The GEO report is not simply a collection of findings; it’s an artefact of the worldview that produced it. That does not render it worthless. But it does mean we should read it, and similar reports, as much for the stories they encode as for the statistics they showcase.
The question for all of us, then, is not simply whether the GEO report is correct or incorrect. It is: what kind of reality does it create? What kind of future does it make imaginable, and what kinds of futures does it quietly exclude?
Numbers as Narratives
Take the headline estimate: $45 trillion a year in environmental damage from food, transport and fossil‑fuelled electricity. Divide that by the hours in a year and you arrive at the $5 billion per hour figure that grabbed the headlines. Are there at least three credible sources that place environmental externalities in the tens of trillions of dollars annually? Yes. The International Monetary Fund has calculated implicit and explicit fossil fuel subsidies and their associated damages at several trillion dollars per year. Studies grouped under the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity banner have placed ecosystem service losses in similarly vast territory. Numerous analyses of air pollution, climate impacts and agricultural degradation converge on the conclusion that the hidden costs of the prevailing economic regime rival or exceed global GDP.
So the GEO numbers are not fantasy. They are defensible within the boundaries of current economic orthodoxy. But they are not “facts” in the manner of the boiling point of water at sea level. They are outputs of models that rest on specific choices: discount rates that privilege present income over future well‑being; methods for pricing non‑market values like biodiversity and human life; assumptions about technological trajectories; probabilities assigned to extreme events. Adjust those inputs and the headline totals change significantly.
The moment we recognise that’s the case we see that such numbers are not only descriptive. They are narrative devices. They tell a particular story about what counts, what can be counted, and who gets to do the counting. They invite certain policy responses—carbon prices, subsidy reforms, dietary shifts—while rendering other possibilities almost invisible. When the report suggests that environmental externalities “must be priced into energy and food”, it’s not deriving that conclusion from nature herself. It is extending a particular civilisational commitment: the belief that monetisation and markets are the primary means by which societies should govern their relationship with the biosphere.
If we treat those figures as unquestionable facts, we lose sight of that underlying worldview. We confuse a contingent story about the world with the world itself.
How Factual Is the GEO Account?
If we disaggregate the report into claims that can be cross‑checked against multiple independent sources, three broad categories begin to appear.
First, some elements rest on robust empirical ground. That the combustion of coal, oil and gas is the dominant driver of anthropogenic carbon emissions is incontrovertible. That air pollution from these fuels kills millions of people prematurely each year has been documented by global burden of disease studies, health organisations and atmospheric scientists. That industrial agriculture is a major cause of deforestation, habitat loss, freshwater depletion and nutrient pollution is clear from decades of land‑use research. That food systems contribute roughly a quarter to a third of total greenhouse gas emissions is backed by several major syntheses. That climate change, ecology and security are now intimately entangled is acknowledged by defence planners, local communities living through climate extremes, and humanitarian agencies dealing with forced displacement.
Second, some claims are well‑grounded in scenario modelling but cannot be described as anything more than plausible projections. The estimates that climate action could generate $20 trillion annually in benefits by 2070 and $100 trillion by 2100 fall into this category. They depend on integrated assessment models whose internals remain largely opaque to the general public, and sometimes even to policymakers who rely on their outputs. They assume particular economic growth pathways, learning rates in renewable technologies, behavioural responses to policy instruments, and levels of international cooperation that are anything but assured.
Third, some statements are overtly normative, even while wrapped in scientific authority. Phrases like “before collapse becomes inevitable” convey a level of certainty that the underlying evidence cannot support. Irreversible damage is already occurring in coral reef systems, glaciers and species extinction. Whether this amounts to “civilisational collapse”, when, and for whom, is much less clear. It’s certainly a legitimate concern, grounded in systems thinking and historical studies of societal breakdown. But to declare inevitability is to step beyond evidence into prophecy.
The difficulty is that popular discourse seldom differentiates among these layers. Media summaries tend to flatten them into one amalgam of “what scientists say”. That erases crucial distinctions between empirical observation, modelled projection and ethical judgment. It also obscures another matter rarely acknowledged explicitly: the nature of the models themselves.
The Architecture of Models – and Their Blind Spots
Models are not mirrors of reality. They are machines for making inferences based on limited data and structured assumptions. They simplify, prioritise, filter and amplify. They can be enormously useful—indeed indispensable—when the dynamics are too complex for unaided human intuition. But they do not stand outside the culture that creates them.
In the case of large environment‑economy models, several features repeat. Growth in output, measured in monetary terms, is taken as the primary indicator of success. Harm is translated into costs—damage to infrastructure, loss of labour productivity, health care expenses, declines in crop yields. Benefits are similarly framed in economic terms: avoided costs, new markets, efficiency gains. These models often struggle to accommodate qualitative ruptures: social movements that reconfigure power relations, moral awakenings that render former practices intolerable, or novel institutional arrangements that don’t fit neatly into the binary categories of state and market.
Moreover, few models meaningfully incorporate cultural mindsets or worldviews as variables in their own right. Yet history suggests that the most profound transitions arise from transformations in shared meaning. Slavery didn’t end because economic models suddenly discovered it was inefficient. Women didn’t win the vote because a cost–benefit analysis deemed it optimal. In each case, a shift in underlying values allowed a different world to be brought into being. Institutions and economies followed.
If our models treat worldviews as fixed exogenous background, rather than plastic sources of change, are they capable of anticipating the real channels through which transformation might emerge? Or do they lock us into extrapolating the recent past, and then call that extrapolation “the future”?
There’s another blind spot. Most global environmental modelling still rests on a civilisation‑specific ontology: the view that humans stand apart from nature; that nature is a stock of resources; that progress is measured through aggregate monetary flows; and that governance is a matter of steering those flows through incentives. This worldview is not shared by all cultures. Indigenous knowledge systems, for example, often treat land, water, animals and ancestors as co‑participants in a living community, rather than as assets. Yet these alternative perspectives seldom appear in the structure of dominant models except as objects of study or constraints on resource extraction.
Could it be that transforming our relationship with the biosphere requires more than just optimising within the assumptions of an industrial‑capitalist frame? Could it demand a reconfiguration in how we understand the relationship between mind, matter and meaning—a shift that no existing integrated assessment model is designed to register?
Bias as Design, Not Accident
We often talk about bias as if it were an error to be corrected—a smudge on the lens of otherwise neutral science. That is misleading. In the GEO report, the most important biases are not accidental. They are embedded in the design of the questions being asked.
A report of this kind is commissioned within a geopolitical context. Nations reliant on fossil fuel exports push back against language that would explicitly target their economic base. Large agricultural interests resist calls for dietary change that might undermine demand for their products. Countries whose elites are tightly woven into global finance prefer policy options that don’t question the supremacy of capital markets. Behind the scenes, delegates argue over words. Sentences that are too direct in their implications are softened. Some proposals never make it onto the page at all.
At the same time, those drafting the scientific parts of the report draw on existing literature. That literature, in turn, reflects funding priorities, institutional norms, and preferences regarding what kinds of knowledge are regarded as “rigorous”. Quantifiable phenomena are privileged over qualitative experience. Econometric analysis takes precedence over indigenous cosmologies. Large‑N statistical studies are ranked above local narratives. None of this is a conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of a global knowledge system shaped by specific historical lineages—colonial expansion, industrialisation, the rise of corporate capitalism, and a particular Enlightenment faith in the power of measurement.
So when the GEO report declares that environmental crises are “political and security emergencies”, that may be descriptively accurate—there is ample evidence that climate disruption acts as a threat multiplier for conflict, undermines food and water security, and destabilises fragile states. But it also reflects an attempt to translate ecological concern into language that fits the priorities of existing power structures. Security. National interest. Profit. Growth. These are not neutral categories. They are pillars of a particular civilisational game.
If we accept that game without question, then the report will appear simply as a plea to refine the rules—to internalise externalities, price carbon, reduce meat consumption, remove harmful subsidies, and roll out social safety nets that cushion the transition. If we’re willing to interrogate the game itself, a more unsettling possibility arises. What if the same underlying worldview that created the crisis is being tasked with solving it? What if the very act of translating living systems into monetary units, so that they can be rendered legible to finance and policy, perpetuates the logic that is unravelling the biosphere?
When Models Rule: Consequences Intended and Unintended
The authority of reports like GEO has real world consequences. On the positive side, they have helped consolidate a planetary awareness that would have been unthinkable even half a century ago. The idea that the climate, ocean chemistry, biodiversity, soils and human economies form a single interdependent system is now part of mainstream debate, not just the province of dissident thinkers. Data on pollution, land‑use change and emissions have emboldened activists, armed communities resisting toxic projects, and informed local and regional planning. In some countries, subsidy reforms and health regulations have indeed saved lives.
Such reports also serve as a counterweight to outright denial. When governments and corporate lobbies attempt to fabricate doubt about well‑evidenced harms, the combined weight of hundreds of researchers, synthesising thousands of studies, can provide a bulwark. That role has been important in struggles over tobacco, leaded petrol, ozone‑depleting chemicals and, more recently, fossil fuels.
There’s another beneficial consequence. When the price system fails to register the true costs of an activity, the resulting misallocation can be grotesque. Treating externalities as invisible exonerates polluters and punishes communities who bear the burden. Quantifying those harms, even imperfectly, can shift responsibility and prompt new institutional arrangements. Removing subsidies for fossil fuels that primarily benefit wealthier groups, and redirecting those funds towards universal basic services or regenerative agriculture, could alleviate poverty and reduce emissions at the same time, if designed and implemented with care.
Yet the shadow side of model‑driven governance is profound. When projections and cost–benefit calculations dominate, politics risks becoming a conversation among technocrats about parameter values. Citizens are invited to accept that experts have already determined what’s both possible and desirable. Democratic deliberation is narrowed to choosing among pre‑filtered options: this carbon price or that one, this percentage reduction in meat consumption or that timeline for phasing out petrol cars. More fundamental questions—what is a good life? how much is enough? what obligations do we have to future generations and to other species?—rarely appear in official forums.
Moreover, predictive models can become self‑fulfilling prisons. If all major planning documents assume that economic growth, measured by GDP, must continue at 2–3 per cent per year indefinitely, then any path that does not satisfy that condition is automatically deemed unrealistic or irresponsible, regardless of its ecological or social merits. Policies are then bent and trimmed to fit the growth template, even when evidence suggests that chasing aggregate expansion is undermining well‑being in many places, and pushing planetary boundaries in ways that threaten everyone.
There’s also the risk of misplaced certainty. A range of climate–economy models once suggested that warming of 3–4°C might be “optimal” when all costs and benefits were accounted for. Only later did it become apparent that those models heavily discounted the lives of people in poorer countries, radically underestimated the risk of non‑linear tipping points, and ignored the intrinsic value of nonhuman life. By that time, their conclusions had already influenced policy debate. What other hidden assumptions are embedded in the next generation of models that will only become visible when it’s too late?
Finally, there is the effect on imagination. If every major report paints the future using the same palette—global markets, technological decarbonisation, marginal reforms to diets, incremental policy shifts—then the possible worlds we can collectively imagine shrink to zero. Alternatives that involve re‑localised economies, commons‑based governance, deep cultural and spiritual renewal, or sweeping reductions in material throughput may still exist in scattered communities and experimental zones. But they are framed as outliers, if they are seen at all, because they don’t appear as serious options in the canonical models.
So we end up with a paradox. Reports like GEO challenge the complacency of the existing order by highlighting its devastating impacts, yet they also reinforce that order by insisting that the remedies must be found within it.
Beyond Prediction: Re‑imagining How We Know and Govern
What would it mean to treat reports like GEO not as oracles, but as one layer in a richer tapestry of planetary sense‑making?
First, we might acknowledge that every model rests on a worldview, and that worldviews are malleable. Instead of hiding this fact behind a façade of neutrality, we could make it explicit. Scientists, economists and modellers could be required to disclose not only their data sources and equations, but also their value commitments. What do they take to be the purpose of an economy? How do they weigh the claims of present versus future beings? How do they treat nonhuman life in their accounting? The answers to such questions are not technical. They are philosophical, ethical and, often, spiritual. Yet they shape what emerges from the modelling process as surely as any parameter.
Second, we might ask whether it’s possible to widen the epistemic base of global assessments. Can indigenous scholars, community organisers, artists, spiritual leaders and practitioners from diverse cultural traditions be integrated into the very design of such enquiries, rather than invited to comment on a pre‑packaged draft? Would that not allow a more polyphonic understanding of human–Earth relationships to surface, including truths that don’t lend themselves to numerical expression but are no less real for that?
Third, we could reframe the role of prediction itself. Instead of relying on forecasts to determine what we think is possible, we could use them as boundary markers. They can tell us what is likely if nothing fundamental changes, and how particular interventions might shift trajectories. But the deeper work—the work of altering the stories a civilisation tells about itself—cannot be outsourced to algorithms. It involves practices of reflection, dialogue, mutual learning and inner transformation that are rarely mentioned in technical reports yet lie at the heart of any lasting shift.
Fourth, we might be more honest about uncertainty and emergence, not as weaknesses to be concealed but as a basic condition of life on a complex planet. A report that admits, for example, that no model currently available can fully anticipate how billions of people might change their expectations, desires and social norms under the pressure of compounding crises might sound less authoritative. But it would be more truthful. That, in turn, might invite citizens into a more active relationship with the future, rather than relegating them to the role of passive recipients of expert warnings.
Finally, we might ask a question rarely posed in official documents: whose future are we modelling, and who has the right to imagine alternatives? The GEO report speaks the language of global averages and aggregate costs. Yet lived reality is always uneven. For a small‑scale farmer in India, a fisher in Senegal, a child in a polluted neighbourhood in Brazil, or an Inuit elder witnessing melting sea ice, the abstractions of a $45 trillion externality may feel remote. What would it mean to design assessments that begin from situated experiences and then connect them outward to planetary processes, instead of starting with global calibrations and then trickling down?
The GEO report is, in many respects, a monumental effort. It collates a vast amount of information. It succeeds in conveying that the current trajectory of food, energy and economic systems is dangerously unsustainable. But it’s also a mirror, reflecting back to us the world‑system that gave rise to it: a civilisation that believes it can manage its way out of existential crisis through refinement of the very tools that produced that crisis.
Perhaps the deeper value of such reports lies not in the predictions they make, but in the questions they provoke. What if we treated each modelling exercise as an opportunity to examine the civilisational assumptions on which it rests? What if we used the numerical projections of harm not just to argue for new taxes or regulations, but to ask whether the narratives that animate our societies—of perpetual growth, of human separation from nature, of competition as the primary driver of progress—are still fit for purpose on a finite, interconnected Earth?
Until we’re willing to do that, we risk mistaking the rearrangement of the deckchairs for a change in course. The GEO report warns that the window for action is narrowing. Perhaps it is. But the most crucial action may not be the one our current models are designed to capture. It may lie in shifting the foundational stories through which eight billion people, in their extraordinary diversity, interpret the world and their place within it. Only then will our models, and the reports built upon them, begin to reflect a different possibility: not merely a more efficiently managed path to the same destination, but the emergence of an entirely different journey.