Since the Paris Climate Accord, the world has been singularly focused on averting dangerous warming. While global goodwill is reassuring, concrete action to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions is largely absent.
However, it is disappointing and even disheartening that a critical counterpart to planetary sustainability, besides climate change, has been largely neglected. The conversation on the consequences of inexorable decline of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services is at best muted.
According to the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services virtually all indicators of the global state of natural systems are in dangerous decline; biomes, ecosystems and species. More species of plants and animals – terrestrial and aquatic – are threatened with extinction today more than in any other epoch in human history.
Across all the systems, terrestrial and aquatic, the most critical direct drivers of species decline and extinction are changes in the use of land and sea, direct exploitation, human-induced climate change, pollution and invasive species.
Weak global and national governance, demographic and social change, economic and technological change have been and continue be indirect drivers of biodiversity decline, often reinforcing or accelerating the impact of direct drivers such as irresponsible exploitation, pollution and global warming.
In the past half-century, the population of humankind has more than doubled in just 50 years, increasing from 3.7 billion to 7.8 billion between 1970 and 2020. The global economy measured by GDP has grown from $3 trillion to about $85 trillion in 50 years. The massive population increase and the associated economic expansion has wrought unprecedented pressure on terrestrial and aquatic systems.
The demand for energy to drive economic output is met largely by burning fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases. Feeding 7.8 billion people has come with conversion of forests, grasslands and wetlands to farmland.
The use of inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides to increase agricultural production has also caused pollution of fresh inland waters and decimated important insect and avian pollinators. Our soils are degraded, poisoned. Destruction of critical habitats has decimated natural hosts for deadly and debilitating diseases like ebola and malaria.
The combination of land degradation, overfishing, eutrophication and invasive species has created a socioeconomic and ecological catastrophe in Lake Victoria.
What was once a wonder of evolution with over 500 fish species is now dominated by the invasive rapacious Nile Perch and the silver cyprinid locally known as Omena or Dagaa.
The decline of Lake Victoria fisheries has been associated with economic stagnation, rise of poverty and reduction of protein in the diets of local communities in the lake basin.
Moreover, the destruction of coastal mangrove forests will exacerbate the impacts of sea level in the tropics and imperil human health, livelihoods and economic wellbeing of hundreds of millions across the globe.
Climate change and biodiversity loss are inextricably coupled, with potential for vicious cycles of catastrophe. They must be addressed together, at one and not separate conferences of parties.
