Futures Forum: Countering mass extinction: we need a Green New Deal plus action on biodiversity
So wrote the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in last week's Guardian:
Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change | Robert Watson | Opinion | The Guardian
Ten years ago, the Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert was writing in the New Yorker:
The Sixth Extinction? | The New Yorker
Here she is again, ten years on - with excerpts from her latest piece in the New Yorker:
Climate Change and the New Age of Extinction
People easily forget “last of” stories about individual species, but the loss of nature also threatens our existence.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
20 May 2019
Last week, an international group of scientists issued what the Times called “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity.” The findings were grim. On the order of a million species are now facing extinction, “many within decades.” “What’s at stake here is a liveable world,” Robert Watson, the chairman of the group, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, told Science.
The U.N.-backed I.P.B.E.S. is to flora and fauna what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to the atmosphere. Based in Bonn, it is funded by a hundred and thirty-two member nations, including the United States. More than three hundred experts contributed to its latest assessment, which runs to more than fifteen hundred pages.
The authors trace two diverging trend lines: one upward-sloping, for people, and one sloping downward, for everything else. During the past fifty years, the planet’s human population has doubled. In that same period, the size of the global economy has quadrupled, and global trade has grown tenfold. If hundreds of millions of people around the world are still mired in poverty, there are many more people living in prosperity today than ever before.
To keep nearly eight billion people fed, not to mention housed, clothed, and hooked on YouTube, humans have transformed most of the earth’s surface. Seventy-five per cent of the land is “significantly altered,” the I.P.B.E.S. noted in a summary of its report, which was released last week in Paris. In addition, “66 per cent of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85 per cent of wetlands (area) has been lost.” Approximately half the world’s coral cover is gone. In the past ten years alone, at least seventy-five million acres of “primary or recovering forest” have been destroyed.
Habitat destruction and overfishing are, for now, the main causes of biodiversity declines, according to the I.P.B.E.S., but climate change is emerging as a “direct driver” and is “increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers.” Its effects, the report notes, “are accelerating.” Watson wrote last week, in the Guardian, that “we cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.”
How long can the two trend lines continue to head in opposite directions? This is the key question raised by the report, and it may turn out to be the key question of the century....
We would, it seems, be well advised to shift course, if only for our own, species-centric reasons. And, according to the I.P.B.E.S., there is still time for “transformative changes” in the “production and consumption of energy, food, feed, fibre and water.” Regrettably, though, all signs point to more of the same. In 2018, carbon-dioxide emissions from the energy sector rose to a new high of thirty-six billion tons. Also in 2018, nearly thirty million acres of tropical forest were lost—an area the size of Pennsylvania. As the Web site InsideClimate News noted, this destruction occurred “even as more corporations and countries made commitments to preserve tropical forests.” As long as we continue to tear through the biosphere, expect the losses to continue to mount.
♦This article appears in the print edition of the May 20, 2019, issue, with the headline “Last Chances.”
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her latest book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.Read more »
Climate Change and the New Age of Extinction | The New Yorker
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Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her latest book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.Read more »
Climate Change and the New Age of Extinction | The New Yorker
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