We have 10 years to save Earth’s biodiversity as mass extinction caused by humans takes hold, UN warns

(CNN)Almost a third of the Earth will need to be protected by 2030 and pollution cut by half to save our remaining wildlife, as we enter the planet’s sixth era of mass extinction, according to a United Nations agency.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity released a draft plan on Monday, which sets global goals to combat the ongoing biodiversity crisis in the coming decades.

The convention had set similar targets in 2010, at a summit in Japan. But the world failed to meet most of those 2020 goals — and is now facing unprecedented extinction rates, threatened ecosystems, and severe consequences for human survival.

“Biodiversity, and the benefits it provides, is fundamental to human well-being and a healthy planet,” the draft plan reads. “Despite ongoing efforts, biodiversity is deteriorating worldwide and this decline is projected to continue or worsen under business-as-usual scenarios.”

The convention aims to stabilize our fragile biodiversity by 2030 and allow ecosystems to recover by 2050, allowing for a final vision of “living in harmony with nature” — but these goals will require urgent action on both local and global levels.

To achieve this, the draft plans lays out 20 targets for the next decade, ranging from carbon emission reduction to food sustainability.

One target is to give protected status to sites important for biodiversity — covering at least 30% of these land and sea areas by 2030, with at least 10% under “strict protection.” Another target is to cut pollution from biocides, plastic wastes, and excess nutrients by at least 50%.

Other 2030 targets include ensuring that the trade of all wild species is legal and sustainable, bringing greater sustainability to economic sectors and individual consumption, and empowering indigenous communities in the conservation effort.

Some targets focus on the quality of human life, like providing better food security and clean water for the most vulnerable communities — which are then expected to reduce “human-wildlife conflict,” the draft plan said.

The plan will be finalized and adopted in October at a biodiversity summit in Kunming, China.

Earth has entered its sixth mass extinction

For years, scientists have warned that we are in the midst of a mass extinction — the sixth in the planet’s history, and the first one caused by humans.

Elephants could be gone from the wild within a generation. Amphibian populations are collapsing. And climate change is warming and acidifying the oceans, threatening to annihilate coral reefs.

In total, a million of the world’s 8 million species are currently facing extinction, many within decades, the UN warned in 2019. The global rate of species extinction is at least tens of hundreds of times higher than it has been on average over the past 10 million years.

The main threats are shrinking habitats, the exploitation of natural resources, climate change and pollution, said the 2019 UN report. Humans have altered 75% of Earth’s land and 66% of marine ecosystems since pre-industrial times — changes that come in different forms, from waste dumped into oceans to human-introduced invasive species.

We have wrecked the world’s natural ecosystems — almost 600 plant species have been wiped out in the past 250 years, an extinction rate 500 times faster than it would have been without human intervention. The plants’ mass extinction spell trouble for the millions of species — including humans — that depend upon them.

A huge part of the problem lies in population growth, rising demand, and depleted resources. With a growing population, we have more mouths to feed, but fewer resources than ever. The planet’s declining biodiversity threatens agriculture, placing our livestock breeds and crops at risk.

But the population boom won’t end anytime soon. The draft plan released Monday warned that the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion by 2030 and 9.8 billion by 2050 — with severe “implications for the demand for resources, including food, infrastructure and land use.” SOURCE

One million species at risk of extinction due to human actions, report says

It is more important than ever that you write to your members of parliament and demand concrete action on the climate emergency and protection of our air, water, and land. Sample letters HERE.

Up to one million species face extinction due to human influence, according to a draft UN-backed report obtained by AFP that painstakingly catalogues how humanity has undermined the natural resources upon which its very survival depends.

WATCH the VIDEO

The accelerating loss of clean air, drinkable water, CO2-absorbing forests, pollinating insects, protein-rich fish and storm-blocking mangroves — to name but a few of the dwindling services rendered by Nature — poses no less of a threat than climate change, says the report, set to be unveiled May 6.

Indeed, biodiversity loss and global warming are closely linked, according to the 44-page Summary for Policy Makers, which distills a 1,800-page assessment of scientific literature on the state of Nature.

Delegates from 130 nations meeting in Paris from April 29 will vet the executive summary line-by-line. Wording may change, but figures lifted from the underlying report cannot be altered.

“We need to recognise that climate change and loss of Nature are equally important, not just for the environment, but as development and economic issues as well,” Robert Watson, chair of the UN-mandated body that compiled the report, told AFP, without divulging its findings.

“The way we produce our food and energy is undermining the regulating services that we get from Nature,” he said, adding that only “transformative change” can stem the damage.

Deforestation and agriculture, including livestock production, account for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and have wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems as well.

Jayne Forbes of Extinction Rebellion speaks to FRANCE 24

‘Mass extinction event’

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report warns of “an imminent rapid acceleration in the global rate of species extinction.”

The accelerating loss of clean air, drinkable water, CO2-absorbing forests, pollinating insects, protein-rich fish and storm-blocking mangroves — to name but a few of the dwindling services rendered by Nature — poses no less of a threat than climate change, says the report, set to be unveiled May 6.

Indeed, biodiversity loss and global warming are closely linked, according to the 44-page Summary for Policy Makers, which distills a 1,800-page assessment of scientific literature on the state of Nature.

“We need to recognise that climate change and loss of Nature are equally important, not just for the environment, but as development and economic issues as well,” Robert Watson, chair of the UN-mandated body that compiled the report, told AFP, without divulging its findings. “The way we produce our food and energy is undermining the regulating services that we get from Nature,” he said, adding that only “transformative change” can stem the damage.

Deforestation and agriculture, including livestock production, account for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and have wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems as well. MORE

Re: The Green New Deal: First, Shoot the Economists

Photograph Source Senate Democrats

Soon to be released research from the United Nations is expected to place species loss, a/k/a mass extinction, as an environmental threat equal to or greater than climate change. Industrial agriculture— vast expanses of monoculture crops managed with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, will feature prominently as a cause. This plant agriculture supplies people with increasingly toxic and processed food and antibiotic and hormone dependent factory farms with animal feed.  Together, these link the model of capitalist efficiency economists have been selling for the last two centuries to environmental crisis.

Understanding the theoretical precepts of Western economics is crucial to understanding these crises. Capitalism is scientific economic production, a method in search of applications. Its object is to maximize profits, not to growth nutritious food sustainably. As industrial agriculture has demonstrated, these objectives are antithetical. Crop yields have increased as the nutritional value of the food produced has declined. But far more troublingly, the narrow focus on profits has led to a form of environmental imperialism where interrelated ecosystems are viewed atomistically.

Mass extinction is largely attributable to the drive for economic control— the expansion of industrial agriculture to feed factory farm animals has been both geographic and intensive. The annihilation of insects through pesticide use on crops has led in turn to the annihilation of the species that feed on them. Interrelated ecosystems are systematically destroyed through a logic that does not ‘work’ otherwise. Leaving ecosystems intact upends it. When value is granted to what is destroyed, industrial agriculture ceases to earn a profit. In a broader sense, this means that it never earned a profit in the first place.

Unlike the narrow technocratic fixes being put forward to resolve global warming, mass extinction points to the systemic problems within capitalist logic. Within it, reconfiguring pieces of the world has a limited impact— so small in fact that the impact is considered ‘external’ to production processes. In an interrelated world, reconfiguring pieces— including annihilating or favoring them, impacts the broader relationships within the system. Were capitalist production not rapidly killing the planet, such esoterica could have remained within the purview of academia.

But it is killing the planet, suggesting that the organizing logic of capitalism is fundamentally flawed. MORE

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