The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is a passionate advocate for planetary and human health. For almost 50 years, UNEP has delivered science to help the world understand the damage humanity’s carbon- and resource-hungry development path is causing to the planet, human health and economies, and has supported policies and actions to halt and reverse this damage. But in 2020, the planet spoke up for itself. COVID-19 hit hard, claiming lives and magnifying inequalities. Economies are facing deep recessions. For the first time in 30 years, poverty is on the rise while the pandemic is driving the world further off-course from achieving the promise of the 2030 Agenda. Like others before it, this pandemic is linked to the way humanity treats nature as fuel for the economic growth engine. The systemic issues that helped to create this pandemic – particularly unsustainable consumption and production – are the same ones driving the three planetary crises: the climate crisis, the biodiversity and nature crisis, and the pollution and waste crisis. The world continued to heat up in 2020, contributing to wildfires, droughts, floods and ravenous locust swarms. The loss of nature to agriculture, infrastructure and human settlements continues to escalate. Pollution of the air, land and sea is still claiming lives and damaging crucial ecosystems. In December 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put these issues at the top of the agenda. He said that humanity must make peace with nature, or face problems far more damaging than COVID-19 in the future. Making peace with nature requires resetting the system. It requires a long-term transformation of how humanity extracts and consumes resources. It requires a rapid and permanent shift to a world that works with nature, not against it. In 2020, despite disruption from the pandemic, UNEP pushed even harder to address the three planetary crises, including by refocusing some of our work to deal with the immediate environmental impacts of COVID-19, such as increased waste and laying the foundations for a green post-pandemic recovery.