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A stark warming sounded the alarm that one million of the planet’s eight million species are threatened with extinction by humans. 145 scientist experts from 50 countries stated in the most comprehensive biodiversity assessment of global nature loss ever; according to a recent United Nations report.
“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble,” said Sandra Díaz, one of the co-chairs of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
The global rate of species extinction “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years,” according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The experts said they found overwhelming evidence that human activities are behind nature’s decline; as they ranked the major drivers of species decline to include deforestation; overfishing; climate change; and pollution.
“Not only is our safety net shrinking, it’s becoming more threadbare and holes are appearing,” said Díaz, an ecologist at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina.
Between the years 1980 and 2000, 100 million hectares of tropical forest were lost, mainly from cattle ranching in South America and palm oil plantations in South East Asia.
The report states that more than 40% of amphibians, 33% of coral reefs and over a third of all marine mammals are threatened with extinction.
“My biggest personal concern is the state of the oceans,” Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told National Geographic.
“Plastics, dead zones, overfishing, acidification… We’re really screwing up the oceans in a big way.”
The report comes six months after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world has less than 12 years to avoid the catastrophic consequences of global warming. In order to prevent this, society needs to shift from a sole focus on chasing economic growth and base their economies on the fact that nature is the foundation for development; thereby, shifting to a nature-based planning can help provide a better quality of life.
