This is the second comprehensive report on the state of Africa's environment, produced in collaboration with the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN). This report highlights the central position Africa's environment continues to play in sustainable development, as well as its potential to achieve progress in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. The report profiles Africa's environmental resources as an asset for the continent's development. It highlights the opportunities presented by the region's natural resource base to support the continent's development. It also underscores the concept of sustainable livelihoods, and the importance of the environmental initiatives in supporting them.

This first edition of the Africa Environment Outlook (AEO) report is a significant milestone in the collaboration between UNEP and the African Ministerial Conference on the Enviornment (AMCEN). Africa faces a number of critical challenges, including the deterioration of the environment; increasing social and economic inequality; and worldwide globalization, which is leaving Africa behind. The AEO is a unique tool. It provides an analysis of the state of the environment over the past 30 years, looks at the driving force behind environmental change, and reviews the consequences for social and economic development. It concludes with recommendations about the road that Africa should take to preserve its great natural riches, biodiversity and vast unspoiled landscapes.

Environment risks are blamed for about 28 per cent of Africa's disease burden, and this includes diarrhoea, respiratory infections and malaria, which collectively account for 60 per cent of known environmental health impacts in the region (WHO and UNEP 2010). The Third Africa Environment Outlook (AEO-3), analyses the importance of, and interlinkages between, health and environment and the opportunities and synergies that might be derived from intensified collaboration between the two sectors. It uses the Drivers, Pressures, State, Exposure, Effects and Actions (DPSEEA) analytical framework to undertake an integrated analysis of the state and trends covering the themes of air quality, biodiversity, chemicals and waste, climate change and variability, coastal and marine resources, freshwater and sanitation as well as land. It also illustrates how socio-economic driving forces can generate environmental pressures, leading to altered ecosystem states, personal exposure to risks and adverse health effects.

This report differs somewhat from it’s predecessors, in the sense that instead of adopting a scenarios-based approach, the thinking developed around the future environmental state has been crystallized using an ’’impact mapping’’ tool within the trends in environmental data and socio-economical policy directions, that have emerged since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994. The aim of this approach is to highlight critical areas, where debates and interventions need to occur and which require understanding, co-ordination and co-operation across the different sectors and decision-making levels of society, from the individual and community level to the corporate and government level.