The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [15]
BOUNDARY ONE
BIODIVERSITY
Our fire-sticks and engines have turned humans into extremely successful predators. We have poisoned, outcompeted, or simply eaten so many other species that the Earth is currently in the throes of its most severe mass extinction event in 65 million years, and it is this crisis of biodiversity loss that arguably forms humanity’s most urgent and critical environmental challenge. Many of our other impacts on the Earth system are more or less reversible, but extinction is forever, and a flourishing diversity of life is essential for the biosphere to function successfully during the Anthropocene and beyond. By removing species, we damage ecosystems, collapse food webs, and ultimately undermine the planetary life-support system on which our species depends just as much as any other.
The planetary boundaries expert group proposes a biodiversity loss boundary of a maximum of ten species lost to life per million species per year. The current rate of loss is already one or two orders of magnitude greater than this: Conservationists estimate that 100 to 1,000 species per million are currently wiped out annually. Meeting this boundary target is possible, but to do so will require a massive increase in the global attention and funding given to the issue and to solving it. We must create many more nature reserves, both on land and at sea. We must properly fund conservation, to defeat poachers and protect wildlife from direct threats. Above all we must alter our accounting systems so that living systems—from rain forests to polar tundra—are given the value they deserve as literally priceless assets of natural capital. This means using the power of markets, with most payments for biodiversity protection going to the local people who are always the best custodians of their local environment.
If we are to save what remains of the glorious diversity of life on Earth, we will have to act fast. A quarter of the world’s mammals, a third of amphibians, about 13 percent of birds, a quarter of warm-water corals, and a quarter of freshwater fishes are globally threatened with extinction. The rate of loss is accelerating, despite increasing concern about this brutal devastation of our planet’s natural history: while 36 mammals improved in terms of how threatened they were between the 2007 and 2008 Red Lists, 150 saw a deterioration, from vulnerable to endangered, from endangered to critically endangered, or critically endangered to extinct.1
In 2002 world governments agreed “to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.” Laudable, of course. So was it met? Not even close. To put numbers on the current crisis, a recent report in Science looked at 31 different indicators—things like habitat quality, population trends, extinction risk, and so on—and found that virtually all of them were either getting worse or showed no improvement in the last decade.2 Stalin said that the death of one person was a tragedy, the death of millions a statistic (and he was an expert). So it seems for species too. Each story is a unique tragedy, yet the aggregated numbers somehow fail to convey the magnitude of this loss.
Even where absolute extinction has been avoided, many species have become functionally extinct in the sense that their remaining numbers are so few—or so scattered—that they no longer play any effective part in the ecosystem. The Iberian lynx, for example, is not extinct—not yet—in the wild, but its total population (between 84 and 143 adults, split into two isolated populations