Coming soon! The mother of all extinctions

Apocalypse now?

Sooner than later, given the pace at which we’re digging our own graves.

Blooming hell! How?

A UN study that looked into massive amounts of data has concluded that humans are going to witness an extinction spree hitherto unheard of thanks to the way we ruin Earth’s natural life. The scientists say as many as a whopping one million species can go extinct within a few decades. For perspective, that’s nearly 25 per cent of all plant and animal species existing today.

Shocking!

According to the UN-sponsored Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019, which is the first of its kind since 2005, human activities are destroying nature a rate that is “tens to hundreds of times” higher than the average over the past 10 million years. And this is not your run-of-the-mill survey: the report, which was in the making for over the past three years, was prepared by more than 450 scientists and diplomats and it is presented to 130 countries for their approval.

I’m all ears...

To start with, the report throws up some shocking numbers. It says nearly a half of the natural ecosystems have already vanished due to human activities and the biomass of wild mammals are now down by a shocking 82 per cent. This loss in biodiversity can wreak havoc across the globe — it has been, already as evidence suggests, says the report prepared by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, based in Bonn, Germany.

The report admits that there are efforts from local communities, governments and other agencies towards protecting biodiversity, still by 2016, 559 of the 6,190 domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and farming vanished from the face of the planet.

The impact of all these on human life is going to quite telling!

You bet! And there’s more: Two in five of all the amphibians are staring at extinction. So do a third of reef-forming corals and other marine species are also at risk. Farming is going to be the biggest hit here, especially given that an important species that aids pollination — insects — are facing grave threats; one in 10 of all insect species will vanish in a matter of a few decades, warn the scientists. To talk business, the report notes that, loss of pollinators alone can shrink crop output by over $570 billion globally.

Degradation of land, another major risk, has already reduced 23 per cent of land worldwide. Yes, food production has gone up since the 1970s, but grazing land now form 25 per cent of the world’s arable land and nearly 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which causes climate change.

Scary!

If that’s the case on the ground, under water, marine plastic pollution has increased 10-fold since 1980, reveals the UN report. This has hit at least 267 species, including 86 per cent of marine turtles, 44 per cent of seabirds and 43 per cent of marine mammals. Again, three-quarters of rivers and lakes now house crops or livestock. And this massive scale of re-use (read exploitation) has impacted the existence of over 500,000 species and many are disappearing.

Can’t take it any more! Is there a fix?

It may sound clichéd, but the solution is to have a global, concerted effort to protect biodiversity, much like the efforts (however emaciated and fragmented they are) to fight human-induced climate change and its impacts. There has to be urgent checks on protecting tree cover, marine pollution, land re-use, and so on, creating policies that would incentivise communities, voluntary agencies, governments and businesses that engage in such missions. Still, that’s going to address the tip of the iceberg.

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