Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
Humanity has wiped out
60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s
foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency
that threatens civilisation. The new estimate of
the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and
involving 59 scientists from across the globe.
It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else. “We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”
It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else. “We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”
“This is far more than
just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is,”
he said. “This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not
a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.” “We are rapidly
running out of time,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert
at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Only by
addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a
stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds
Many scientists
believe the world has begun a sixth
mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species – Homo sapiens.
Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind
has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of
civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would
take 5-7
million years for the natural world to recover. The Living Planet
Index, produced for WWF by the Zoological Society of London, uses data on
16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians,
representing more than 4,000 species, to track the decline of wildlife. Between
1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of
60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%. The “shocking truth”, said Barrett, is
that the wildlife crash is continuing unabated.
Wildlife and the
ecosystems are vital to human life, said Prof Bob Watson, one of the world’s
most eminent environmental scientists and currently chair of an
intergovernmental panel on biodiversity that said in March that the destruction
of nature is as dangerous as climate change. .. read more:
