Nature pushed to the brink by ‘runaway consumption’: WWF
Unbridled consumption has decimated global wildlife, triggered a mass extinction and exhausted Earth’s capacity to accommodate humanity’s expanding appetites, the conservation group WWF warned on Tuesday.
From 1970 to 2014, 60% of all animals with a backbone -fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- were wiped out by human activity, according to WWF’s “Living Planet” report, based on an ongoing survey of more than 4,000 species spread over 16,700 populations scattered across the globe. “The situation is really bad, and it keeps getting worse,” WWF International director general Marco Lambertini told AFP.
“The only good news is that we know exactly what is happening.” For freshwater fauna, the decline in population over the 44 years monitored was a staggering 80 per cent. Regionally, Latin America was hit hardest, seeing a nearly 90% loss of wildlife over the same period.
Another dataset confirmed the depth of an unfolding mass extinction event, only the sixth in the last halfbillion years. Depending on which of Earth’s lifeforms are included, the current rate of species loss is 100 to 1,000 times higher than only a few hundred years ago, when people began to alter Earth’s chemistry and crowd other creatures out of existence.
Measured by weight, or biomass, wild animals today only account for four per cent of mammals on Earth, with humans (36%) and livestock (60%) making up the rest.
Ten thousand years ago that ratio was probably reversed. “The statistics are scary,” said Piero Visconti, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.