Nature under siege as a million species face extinction, UN warns

Humanity is squandering the natural capital that has allowed society to thrive, driving a million species to the brink of extinction in the process, a landmark UN report on the state of Nature warned Monday.

Relentless plundering and poisoning of Earth’s bounty — water, wildlife, air, soil and forests — threatens societies “at least as much as climate change,” said Robert Watson, who chaired the 132-nation meeting that validated a Summary for Policymakers forged by 450 experts.

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality-of-life worldwide,” said Watson. “We really need to get governments to think beyond GDP.”

“It is like using the goose that lays golden eggs to make soup,” said co-chair Eduardo Brondizio, a professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington.

The accelerating pace of extinction — ten to hundreds of times faster than over the last 10 million years — could tip Earth into the first mass extinction since non-avian dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago.

Halting and reversing these dire trends will require “transformative change” — a sweeping overhaul of the way we produce and consume almost everything, especially food, the report concluded.

Watson said pushback from vested interests is likely to be fierce.

“A lot of actors in the fossil fuel industry and agriculture sector would not want to see energy, transportation or agriculture subsidies reduced,” he told AFP.

“But these are the hard decisions that governments need to take.”

Drawing from 15,000 sources and an underlying 1,800-page report, the executive summary details how our growing footprint and appetites have compromised the natural renewal of resources that sustain civilization, starting with fresh water, breathable air, and productive soil.

– A vicious cycle –

An October report from the UN’s climate science panel painted a similarly dire picture for global warming, and likewise highlighted the need for social transformation “on an unprecedented scale” to cap the rise in temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

Climate change and biodiversity loss, it turns out, feed off each other in a vicious cycle.

Deforestation and industrial agriculture are major drivers of species and ecosystem decline, but also account for at least a quarter of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Global warming, in turn, is pushing thousands of animals and plants out of their comfort zones, and intensifies the kind of heatwaves and droughts that recently fueled unprecedented fires in Australia, Indonesia, Russia, Portugal, California and Greece.

The overlapping drivers of global warming and biodiversity loss point to shared solutions, but there is potential for policy conflict too, the new report cautioned.

Plans to green the global economy reserve a crucial role for burning biofuels and locking away the CO2 released, a technology known as BECCS.

But the huge tracts of land needed to grow energy crops on this scale — roughly twice the size of India — would clash with the expansion of protected areas and reforestation efforts, not to mention food production.

Indigenous peoples, the report found, have slowed the rate of degradation across the quarter of Earth’s land mass over which they have some form of tenure, using traditional knowledge and techniques.

The forests they manage, for example, soak up more CO2 and are less prone to fire.

But the global economy’s insatiable appetite for fresh resources is rapidly overwhelming their stewardship.

For the first time, the UN body ranked the top five causes of species lost and the degradation of Nature.

– Consumer society –

By a long shot, the first two are diminished or degraded habitat, and hunting for food or the trade — often illicit — in body parts.

All but seven percent of major marine fish stocks, for example, are in decline or exploited to the limit of sustainability despite efforts by regional management organizations to fish sustainably.

Global warming is third on the list, but is likely to move up.

“We can see the climate change signal getting stronger really, really quickly,” IPBES co-chair Sandra Diaz, a professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, told AFP.

Numbers four and five are pollution — 400 million tonnes of heavy metals, toxic sludge and other waste are dumped into oceans and rivers each year — and alien species, such as rats, mosquitoes, snakes and plants that hitch rides on ships or planes.

“Every extinction of a species is a failure of humankind,” said Alexandre Antonelli, director of Britain’s Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, reacting to the report.

The heavily negotiated text does not set benchmarks for progress or “last chance” deadlines for action, as the 2018 climate report did.

In an open letter, some 600 experts, business leaders and celebrities led by conservationist Jane Goodall urged world leaders to “halt the decline in Nature”.

“We must radically change the way we live, including how we use energy to power our societies, grow our food, and manage our waste,” they wrote.

The UN panel isn’t mandated to make explicit policy recommendations.

But it does point unmistakably to actions needed: reduce meat consumption, halt deforestation in tropical countries, discourage luxury consumption, slash perverse subsidies and embrace the concept of a low-growth economy.

A key meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in China in October 2020 “will be a crucial milestone to see if there is political will to take the evidence gathered to start transformative changes,” Watson said.