Average populations of monitored wildlife species have declined by 73% over the past 50 years
According to the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures the state of global biodiversity, the average abundance of monitored wildlife species has declined by 73% over the past 50 years.
It is based on approximately 35,000 population trends and 5,495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles. Freshwater populations suffered the greatest decline, with an 85% decline, followed by terrestrial populations (69%) and marine populations (56%).
“Nature is being lost, and it has huge implications for us all,” says the latest edition of the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) biennial flagship publication, the Living Planet Report, produced in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London. Edition warned. “Biodiversity sustains human life and underpins our societies. Yet all indicators that track the state of nature on a global scale show declines.”
The fastest decline was in Latin America and the Caribbean (95%), followed by Africa (76%) and Asia-Pacific (60%).
The decline was less dramatic in Europe and Central Asia (35%) and North America (39%), but this suggests that large-scale impacts on nature were already evident in these regions before 1970. It reflects the facts.” Thanks to conservation efforts and species reintroductions, some populations have stabilized or increased.
Habitat degradation and loss, primarily caused by human food systems, is the biggest culprit, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease, according to the report. Other threats include climate change, most commonly cited in Latin America and the Caribbean, and pollution, particularly in North America, Asia, and the Pacific.
Africa is unique as a region, with a large number of large mammals and rich biodiversity. Africa's LPI showed a decline of 76%, equivalent to 2.8% per year.
“The continent's biodiversity provides essential resources not only for many rural populations, but also for the rest of Africa and the world at large,” the report said. “In Africa, overexploitation is more often reported as a threat to LPI populations than in other regions, and trends in population exploitation have shown a significant decline compared to other regions. It highlights the urgent need to protect these vital resources.”
Stable populations over long periods of time provide resilience to disturbances such as disease and extreme weather events. As shown in the global LPI, population declines “reduce resilience and threaten ecosystem functioning.”
This will undermine the benefits that ecosystems provide people, from food, clean water and carbon storage to stabilize the climate, to the wide range of contributions that nature makes to cultural, social and spiritual well-being. .
The index and similar indicators show that “nature is disappearing at an alarming rate.” While some changes may be small and gradual, their cumulative impact can lead to larger and more rapid changes. Once these thresholds are reached, the changes become permanent, resulting in “significant, often sudden, and sometimes irreversible changes.”
This is called the tipping point. In nature, if current trends continue, several tipping points are “likely” to occur, with potentially catastrophic consequences. These include global tipping points that threaten humanity and most species, damage Earth's life support systems, and “destabilize societies everywhere.”
There are early warning signs that several global tipping points are “rapidly approaching”, the report warns. These include mass die-offs of coral reefs that will destroy fishing and storm protection for hundreds of millions of people living on our coasts, while a tipping point in the Amazon rainforest will release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. , weather patterns around the world would be disrupted.
Countries around the world are committed to achieving prosperity, including halting and reversing biodiversity loss (Convention on Biological Diversity), limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C (Paris Agreement), and eradicating poverty and ensuring human well-being. and set global goals for a sustainable future. (Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs).
However, the world is far from what is needed to meet the 2030 goals, the report says. “More than half of the 2030 SDG targets will not be achieved, and 30% of them are stuck or have worsened from their 2015 baseline.”
National efforts to combat climate change will cause global average temperatures to rise by almost 3°C by the end of the century, “inevitably triggering multiple catastrophic tipping points.” National biodiversity strategies and action plans are inadequate and lack financial and institutional support.
“Approaching climate, biodiversity and development goals separately increases the risk of conflicts between different objectives. For example, between land use for food production, biodiversity conservation and renewable energy. However, with a coordinated and comprehensive approach, many conflicts can be avoided and trade-offs minimized and managed.”
Sustaining a living planet where people and nature can thrive requires “actions commensurate with the scale of the challenge. We need to do more, and that requires transforming our food, energy and financial systems.
“We all have to come together and do something fundamentally different,” WWF South Africa chief executive Mornet du Plessis said at the report's launch. “Statistics just show us that we can't just keep painting, we have to put something back together.
“What’s going to happen over the next five years is that all these agreements – SDGS, climate targets, nature targets – are going to converge, and that’s when we can look back and say we made progress faster than before. Because we have to. We live in a very vulnerable environment.”
Locally, there are inspiring examples of institutions and initiatives that are relevant to South Africa. “A good example of the level of ambition required is SANParks Vision 2040, which reimagines the future of conservation on a much larger scale and in a more comprehensive way through the concept of mega living landscapes.”
These are large interconnected land areas that include protected areas, private and common lands, and a variety of compatible land uses. If we are to succeed in halting further biodiversity loss, this approach needs to be further promoted and further promoted.
“Such an approach would not only make society more inclusive, it would also be much more cost-effective to manage, allowing conservation efforts to be scaled up to new levels,” the report said. There is.
Regarding the 30×30 goal, Du Plessis added: “We have to change the way we do conservation, or the way we interpret conservation. Most countries sit between 10% and 16%, so it takes a very different approach to tackle these things. you will need a way [of formally protected areas].
“Depending on how hard we are on ourselves, we are somewhere between 12% and 15%, so we need to double what is currently officially protected. And… In addition to that 30%, we need to restore 30% of the degraded land to put some of the removed pop rivets back into the plane's wings.”
There is much work to be done, he said. “This includes expanding and expanding systems that properly fund protected areas. We need to significantly increase our efforts outside of our current formal protected areas. We must find many creative ways, including a draft biodiversity economy strategy that incorporates nature-based solutions to mitigate the climate and halt biodiversity loss.”
He emphasized that people are not an afterthought. “For all these recommendations and activities to survive, all solutions must be inclusive, fair, equitable and human rights-based.
“Now, it's not a simple matter. This is one of the most difficult things for us to achieve, but WWF and other environmental organizations are determined that people and nature can thrive together. ”
Deon Nel, head of environmental programs at WWF South Africa, said what happens over the next five years will be critical to the future of life on Earth.
“We have the power and opportunity to change this trajectory. In December 2022, South Africa will join 195 other countries to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put nature on a recovery path by 2030. We signed a global plan that requires us to think, act, and allocate resources exponentially. Progressive gains are not enough. To meet the challenges, institutions will need to reinvent themselves.”
Criticisms of the Living Planet Index published by academics earlier this year found that it was not a reliable measure of population change and “suffered from several mathematical and statistical problems” and that It has been found that even in the population where the population is in control, there is a bias toward an apparent decline.
“It would be naive to think that pressure on vertebrate populations began in the 1970s. Many vertebrate populations had already been severely exploited in the 19th century and the first half of the last century, and it was only when they recovered that In recent decades, global awareness of environmental issues and socio-economic changes around the world.
The current stage of the Anthropocene is therefore “characterized by more complex changes than the simple extinction of vertebrate populations. In the end, this is good news,” the researchers noted. .