The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report produced in 2019 shows the biodiversity crisis is on a par with the threat posed by climate change. We are part of the natural world and we depend on it to stay alive.
A "biological annihilation" of wildlife in recent decades means the Sixth Mass Extinction in Earth's history is under way.
Looking at the UK for example, the 2016 State of Nature report found that they were "among the most nature-depleted countries in the world". One in five British mammals are at risk of being lost from the countryside with the populations of hedgehogs and water voles declining by almost 70% in just the past 20 years. Whilst another new report by the British Trust for Ornithology found that more than a quarter of British bird species are threatened, including the Puffin, the Nightingale and Curlew. Across Europe the abundance of farmland birds has fallen by 55% in just the past three decades!
Globally species are going extinct at rates up to 1,000 times the background rates typical of Earth's past. The direct causes of biodiversity loss being habitat change, overexploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient loading and climate change.
Thelatest Living Planet Index shows an average decline of 60% in population sizes of thousands of vertebrate species around the world between 1970 and 2014.
More than a quarter of species assessed by the IUCN (around 100,000) are threatened with extinction. That is 40% of all amphibians, 25% of all mammals, 34% of all conifers, 14% of all birds, 33% of reef-building corals, 31% of sharks and rays.
Corals reefs are suffering mass die-offs from heat stress. These events are becoming much more common with back to back die-offs on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 2016 and 2017. The predictions are that at just 2C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures these heat waves will occur on an annual basis and coral reefs would become functionally extinct.
"20 years from now, every summer will be too hot for corals: they will disappear as dominant members of tropical reef systems by 2040-2050. It's hard to argue it any other way." - Prof. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg directs the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland.