On June 5 we marked the 47th World Environment Day. The day was established to mark the first day of the Stockholm Conference on Human Environment held in 1972.
That our planet is in peril is no longer a question for debate. According to World Wide Fund for Nature, the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. In other words, up to 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
A report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reveals that around 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction within decades.
Experts believe that the rapid extinction of critical biodiversity is caused largely by the interconnected and self-reinforcing effects of: land-use change, especially deforestation, climate change; pollution; overexploitation of land and aquatic plants and animals, and; invasive species.
But unlike previous extinction events in geological history, the present extinction challenge is anthropogenic, wholly caused by our kind.
It is estimated that wildlife numbers in Kenya, especially migratory species, have declined by 68 per cent in the 40-year period between 1977 and 2016 both inside and outside protected areas.
This staggering decline in wildlife coincides with an increase in livestock numbers in Kenya’s rangelands. This is the clearest association between land-use change and species decline.
Rapid biodiversity decline is not limited to terrestrial flora and fauna. A report published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that 76 per cent of the biodiversity endemic to Lake Victoria is at risk of becoming extinct.
The major drivers of species extinction in Lake Victoria are pollution from municipal and agricultural sources, land degradation, proliferation of invasive species, especially the Water Hyacinth and the Nile Perch.
The recent history of Lake Victoria fisheries exemplifies dangerous and irreversible ecosystem decline. A lake that was once home to 600-1,000 fish species, all but four of them endemic, is now dominated by just three species: Nile Perch, Omena and the Nile tilapia.
What was once referred to as “Darwin’s dream pond” is now the most elegant case study of a most dramatic vertebrate extinction in the modern era.
The consequences of ecosystem degradation in the Lake Victoria basin is powerfully demonstrated by interconnected complex factors of economic stagnation of the lacustrine towns, low farm productivity, malnutrition, hunger, disease, rural-urban migration and poverty. These factors converge to create enduring, hard to break, poverty traps.
We are part of, not apart from, nature. Our health and our economies are inextricably linked to the quality of our ecosystems, especially the delicate balance of diverse living components: air, water, soil, plants and animals, and I mean all plants and animals.
Our social, physical, spiritual and economic wellbeing is tightly coupled with the health of our ecosystems.
Economists must account fully for the contribution of nature to national and global GDP. Not attending urgently to climate change and environmental degradation inflicts incalculable costs in disease and loss of vital ecosystem services.
Vice Provost at Aga Khan University. The views expressed are the writer’s
