“Perhaps you saw the memes, circulating like new variants of anxiety in the early months of the pandemic: a series of tidal waves, one following another and each taller than the last. The first wave represented Covid-19; behind it, and larger, the economic recession that would supposedly follow; then, a towering wave for climate change; and then, behind that and largest still, biodiversity collapse.
For the kind of person who has spent the past few years increasingly alarmed about climate, it might be strange to think of anything as looming larger than warming, which in recent decades has seemed to subsume not only all other ecological crises in the collective cultural imagination but also the existential fate of the species and the planet. The United Nations’ 15th international biodiversity conference just concluded in Montreal, and it received only a fraction of the press coverage lavished on the COP27 climate conference recently held in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. That imbalance may seem intuitive, given one of the core principles of climate action in the post-Paris-agreement era: that decarbonization should be the environmental goal above all others, and might even offer a silver bullet to solve (or at least alleviate) all sorts of other problems, from mass extinction and insect collapse to air pollution and global inequality.”
“. . . . . . The problem is that warming is just one of the many ways that human civilization is stripping the planet of its biological complexity. In fact, last December, in a commentary published in Conservation Letters, a group of biologists called climate change a “myopic lens” through which to view the biological decline of the planet and called warming far from “the most important horseman of the biodiversity apocalypse” — indeed more of a “mule,” powerful but slow. “The current perception that climate change is the principal threat to biodiversity is at best premature,” the authors wrote. “Although highly relevant, it detracts focus and effort from the primary threats: habitat destruction and overexploitation.”
Because we all live in the world as it is today, regarding both its dimly remembered past and its uncertain future from the relatively stable-seeming vantage of the present, it can be hard to understand the scope of even recent loss. But according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report, which looks at studies of some 32,000 species worldwide, vertebrate populations have declined on average by 69 percent since just 1970; since I was born in 1982, the decline has been more than 50 percent. In some ecosystems, the collapse of vertebrates has been even more drastic: In Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, the studied populations have fallen on average by 94 percent since 1970, while among freshwater species that live in the world’s rivers and lakes, the estimated decline has been 83 percent.
As many as a million animal and plant species currently face the threat of extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (I.P.B.E.S.), a figure that translates to about 13 percent of bird species, 25 percent of mammals and 31 percent of sharks and rays. Insects are dying off, too — possibly more than 50 percent of them since 1970.”
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