Our world is losing
biodiversity, and fast. According to a report released today by the United
Nations, up to one million species could face extinction in the near future due
to human influence on the natural world. Such a collapse in biodiversity would
wreak havoc on the interconnected ecosystems of the planet, putting human
communities at risk by compromising food sources, fouling clean water and air,
and eroding natural defenses against extreme weather such as hurricanes and
floods.
In the sweeping
UN-backed report, hundreds of scientists found that biodiversity loss poses a
global threat on par with climate change. A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers”
was released in advance of the full report, which is expected to be published
later this year and span nearly 2,000 pages. The document calls the rate of
change in nature “unprecedented” and projects that species extinctions will
become increasingly common in the coming decades, driven by factors such as
land development, deforestation and overfishing.
“The basic message is
the same as what the scientific community has been saying for more than 30
years: Biodiversity is important in its own right. Biodiversity is important
for human wellbeing, and we humans are destroying it,” Robert Watson, the
former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that produced the report, said during a press
conference on Monday.
To produce the report,
145 biodiversity experts plus hundreds of other contributors compiled
information over three years from 15,000 sources. For years, scientists have
been sounding the alarm about biodiversity’s dramatic decline in what some have
dubbed the world’s sixth
mass extinction event. This die-off, however, differs from the other five
in its central cause: humans.
As the global assessment
confirms, human activity is a major driver of biodiversity decline among
the millions of species on Earth. The report ranks some of the
top causes of species loss as changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation
of organisms (like hunting or fishing), climate change, pollution and invasive
alien species (often introduced by human travel across ecosystems).
The current global rate of species extinction is already “at least tens to
hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years,”
and it’s expected to keep accelerating.
The destruction of
biodiversity at all levels, from genes to ecosystems, could pose
significant threats to humankind, the report says. In addition to affecting
human access to food resources, clean water and breathable air, a loss of
species on a global scale could also clear a path for diseases and parasites to
spread more quickly, says Emmett Duffy, a biodiversity expert with the
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who contributed to the report.
“Historically, a lot of
us have thought about conservation and extinction in terms of charismatic
animals like pandas and whales,” Duffy says. “But there’s a very strong utilitarian
reason for saving species, because people depend on them. There’s an
environmental justice aspect.”
The effects of
biodiversity loss won’t be distributed equally, either, the researchers found.
The most devastating impacts would disproportionately affect some of the
world’s poorest communities, and the report concludes that the decline in
biodiversity undermines global progress toward the Sustainable
Development Goals, milestones set by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015 to
reduce global inequality…..
Important
aspects of the Global Assessment
Building upon earlier IPBES assessment
reports, especially the recently-released Land Degradation and Restoration
Assessment and the Regional Assessment Reports for Africa, the Americas,
Asia-Pacific and Europe and Central Asia (March, 2018), the Global Assessment:
• Covers all land-based ecosystems
(except Antarctica), inland water and the open oceans
• Evaluates changes over the past 50 years — and implications for our
economies, livelihoods, food security and quality of life
• Explores impacts of trade and other global processes on biodiversity and
ecosystem services
• Ranks the relative impacts of climate change, invasive species, pollution,
sea and land use change and a range of other challenges to nature
• Identifies priority gaps in our available knowledge that will need to be
filled
• Projects what biodiversity could look like in decades ahead under six future
scenarios: Economic Optimism; Regional Competition; Global Sustainability;
Business as Usual; Regional Sustainability and Reformed Markets
• Assesses policy, technology, governance, behaviour changes, options and
pathways to reach global goals by looking at synergies and trade-offs between
food production, water security, energy and infrastructure expansion, climate
change mitigation, nature conservation and economic development
KEY MESSAGES
·
Average
temperatures will continue to increase in all seasons (very high confidence).
·
More
hot days and warm spells are projected with very high confidence. Fewer
frosts are projected with high confidence.
·
Decreases
in winter rainfall are projected with medium confidence. Other changes are
possible but unclear.
·
Increased
intensity of extreme rainfall events is projected, with high confidence.
·
Mean
sea level will continue to rise and height of extreme sea-level events will
also increase (very high confidence).
·
A
harsher fire-weather climate in the future (high confidence).
·
On
annual and decadal basis, natural variability in the climate system can act to
either mask or enhance any long-term human induced trend, particularly in the
next 20 years and for rainfall.
At its ordinary monthy meeting of 23 April 2019 Clarence Valley Council passed the following resolution:
