THE COMMODITY ISSUE
Youth Strike for Climate
protests in London, UK
Photo Nuala O’Leary
t our Cambridge office in the UK, the
endless news coverage of Brexit is
finally giving way to something
different. In recent months, headlines
have reported Extinction Rebellion protesters
blocking the streets of London, Sir David
Attenborough explaining the science behind
climate change on prime-time television, and
16-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg
meeting with party leaders in Parliament.
Across the world, civil society has similarly
mobilised: school children are going on ‘climate
strike’ in 30 countries, Extinction Rebellion
protests have spread from South Africa to Hong
Kong to Australia, and indigenous people are
gathering to demand environmental protection
for their territories in Brazil.
A
To some, such protests are little more than an
irritation or distraction from ‘business as usual’.
But a hard-hitting new global report backs up
the protesters’ actions with solid fact. Drawn
from 15,000 scientific and government sources,
and compiled by nearly 150 expert authors from
50 countries over three years, it shows that
‘business as usual’ is no longer an option.
What makes this report special is that it is not
an assessment compiled by the science world
and then submitted to the government. On the
contrary, it has in fact been endorsed and
adopted by the governments themselves, as
members of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). In
May, the panel attended a week-long meeting in
JUL-SEP 2019 • BIRDLIFE
Paris to fine-tune the report before publication.
As one of the key contributors to the report,
BirdLife was in the midst of the action.
The messages of the IPBES global assessment,
when it was released, were hard to ignore:
nature is declining at a rate unprecedented in
human history. One in four species assessed by
the IUCN Red List is threatened with extinction
– which works out as a possible one million
species we may lose within our lifetimes.
Even species that are not yet threatened have
suffered substantial declines in abundance.
Vertebrate species have on average seen a 60%
drop in numbers since 1970. The habitats that
these species depend on are also being lost:
overall, 75% of the planet’s land area and 40% of
its marine area is severely altered by human
impact.
The loss of species, genes and habitats is not
just of concern to academics and
conservationists, but to us all. A healthy
ecosystem is one that has both variety and
abundance of life, and it is this delicate balance
that delivers what are known as ‘ecosystem
services’ such as pollination, water purification
and carbon storage. These in turn provide us
with the food, water and clean air we need to
live. The more biodiverse an ecosystem, the
greater the benefits and the more likely that it
will be resilient to change – including climate
change – in the long term.
In short, the loss of biodiversity is destroying
our life-support system: a threat just as urgent
as the now-famous ‘1.5-degree’ climate change
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