Living Planet report show mass decline in biodiversity0:24
The WWF Living Planet report shows an alarming decline in biodiversity as animal populations become smaller. Courtesy: WWF
AS HUMANS continue to swallow up the globe, we do so at the expense of the planet’s biodiversity as animal populations continue to decline at an alarming rate.
That is the stark message at the core of a recent report released by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) called the Living Planet Report 2016. The sobering study reaffirms the fact we’re in the middle of a human-produced mass extinction event that is seeing populations of animal species evaporate in front of our eyes.
From 1970 to 2012 populations of vertebrate animals have decreased in abundance by 58 per cent. As the trend continues, researchers expect about two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals to have disappeared from the 50 years between 1970 and 2020.
The WWF points to habitat loss and habitat degradation as a key factor in Earth’s declining biodiversity, along with climate change, unsustainable practices in things like the global food supply and an overuse of the Earth’s natural resources which exceeds the planet’s biocapacity.
The report, and its fatalistic conclusions, has been met with some slight aprehension however Professor Corey Bradshaw from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences says “the take home message is spot on.”
The data may be a tad imprecise due to the immense difficulty of conducting a census on global populations of thousands of animal species, but Prof Bradshaw said the report is just the latest to paint a dire picture of the world’s rapidly declining biodiversity.
“While we tend to focus on species loss, the process or probability in determining the extinction of an animal is actually very difficult because as it gets very rare, it’s difficult to determine if the thing actually goes extinct,” he told news.com.au.
“What’s much easier to examine is declines in population sizes ... when you have populations going extinct, eventually the species will go extinct. So this is actually a really sensitive indicator for the plight of biodiversity in general.”
The ominous sentiment was echoed by the executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford University, Anthony Barnosky.
“We’re losing individuals of species and geographic ranges at a really rapid rate,” he told CNN. “If you keep that up, extinction of lots of species is inevitable.”
Scientists have suggested that we have in fact transitioned from the holocene period into a new geological epoch called the “anthropocene”.
The anthropocene period is characterised by human domination of the environment.
You may have missed the memo, but it’s been common knowledge for a long time among scientists. The findings included in the WWF report certainly don’t come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention, Prof. Bradshaw said.
“It’s no surprise. We’ve got 7.4 billion people on the planet and we cut down forests to grow our food and sell the timber, and we fish, and we hunt bush meat.
“That’s the obvious compromise, as we expand to feed an ever growing human population, other species are gonna cop it.”
He said the report simply provides a large data set which “underlies the magnitude” of the unfortunate trend.
Despite its potentially disastrous consequences, Prof. Bradshaw is unsure if humans will be able to do much to preserve the planet’s biodiversity as much as we would like.
“I don’t think we can halt the trend,” he said.
While global efforts like the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the recent Paris agreement on climate change (set to come into effect September 2016) are all positive steps, it will take a significant overhaul of many of the world’s systems to prevent the continued decline in biodiversity.
Primarily being “more efficient with how we grow our food and source our water,” Prof. Bradshaw said. “We probably have to not only rethink our agriculture, but also how we source the energy to do it.”
As the WWF reports points out; “food production is one of the primary causes of biodiversity loss through habitat degradation, overexploitation of species such as overfishing, pollution and soil loss.
“Ultimately, addressing social inequality and environmental degradation will require a global paradigm shift toward living within planetary boundaries. We must create a new economic system that enhances and supports the natural capital upon which it relies.”
The Australian federal government’s five-yearly State of Environment report is due out before the end of the year and the Australian Conservation Foundation expects a similarly concerning report to emerge about our own continent.
“It will tell a similar story to the one reported by WWF’s Living Planet Index. Species in decline, habitat being lost, land and water degraded and polluted,” the foundation’s campaign director Dr Paul Sinclair told news.com.au.
He called on the federal government to do more to protect our natural environments and accused it of going missing on the issue.
“The federal government is missing in action on biodiversity conservation, just as it is on reducing climate pollution,” Dr Sinclair lamented.
“The government now spends less than half of one per cent of its total budget on biodiversity conservation. While total government spending has increased since 2014, the amount spent on biodiversity conservation has been dramatically cut.”
Another trend that is going in precisely the wrong direction.