10 ways the climate crisis and nature loss are linked
Nature loss and the climate crisis are locked in a vicious cycle. These two issues are separate yet inextricably linked. As the climate crisis escalates, natural habitats are being destroyed. This in turn exacerbates the climate crisis and loss of wildlife. Here are 10 ways the two issues are connected:
Wildfires destroy ecosystems
Uncontrollable wildfires are becoming more frequent and more extensive – in 2021, there were even reports of smoke reaching the north pole for the first time. The climate crisis is creating tinderbox conditions in which wildfires start, including more drought, higher air temperatures and strong winds. A quarter of landscapes are facing longer fire seasons. Wildfires wreak havoc not only on human health and infrastructure, but also on the environments they burn. The Australian bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 resulted in nearly 3 billion animals being killed or displaced, according to estimates by scientists, while carbon emissions from wildfires are at an all-time high.
landscapes lead to
Degraded more fires
Humans have modified landscapes in a way that makes them more vulnerable to wildfires. For example, scientists warn that recent fires in Hawaii were so intense because of the invasive grasses that now cover a quarter of the islands. In Portugal, which has also seen extremely destructive wildfires in recent years, large plantations of fast-growing and flammable eucalyptus trees have been grown to supply the country’s significant paper pulp industry. This has made the country less resilient to wildfires, and authorities now plan to create more biodiverse forests populated with fire-resistant oak and chestnut trees. Degraded ecosystems are generally more flammable, with more fires causing more landscape damage. Better landscape management and supporting natural landscapes is key, experts say.
Destroyed terrestrial landscapes cannot store carbon
Wild landscapes are home to wildlife but many, such as peatlands, permafrost and forests, are also carbon-rich. These living systems – sometimes referred to as “nature-based solutions” – suck up carbon dioxide and lock it in waterlogged soils and trees. According to the UN, the land and ocean suck up more than half of carbon emissions. So destroying these landscapes, whether by fire, industrial farming or the extraction of natural resources, results in carbon being released.
Heat damages and kills wildlife
As temperatures inch up year by year, animals are having to adapt their behaviour to cope with the changes. In Greece, research suggests brown bears are more likely to be active at night. African wild dogs have less time to hunt during the day due to rising temperatures. Nearly every sea turtle born in Florida in the past few years has been female. Research is just starting to scratch the surface in terms of understanding how heat is restructuring wildlife populations. Heat-induced
stress is likely to cause all kinds of problems, including loss of fertility, immunity and increased mortality.
Marine heatwaves destroy the ocean
We often think about wildlife on land because it’s more visible, but many scientists are even more worried about what is happening in our oceans. Marine heatwaves have been recorded in New Zealand, the UK and Australia in the past few months. In 2021, more than 1 billion marine animals were believed to have died along Canada’s Pacific coast as temperatures reached 40C (104F). Warming of 2C is expected to essentially wipe out tropical corals reefs, which have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem globally. Coral reefs are important fish nurseries and help feed more than 500 million people worldwide, most of whom are in poor countries.
Destroyed oceans cannot store carbon
The ocean is the largest store of carbon in the world. But it is absorbing too much carbon from the atmosphere, making the seas more acidic, with widely documented negative impacts on marine life. Overexploitation is exacerbating these problems, making oceans even more ecologically poor. A study found fishing boats that bottomtrawl the ocean floor release as much carbon dioxide as the aviation industry. The UK has lost 92% of its seagrass in the past two centuries due to a combination of factors, including sewage discharges, nutrients running off farmland and coastal developments. This matters because forests of seagrass are believed to suck up carbon four times faster than forests on land.
Loss of animals from forests reduces the carbon they can store
Poaching and the loss of fruit-eating monkeys and birds in tropical forests is driving up carbon emissions, according to research published in Science Advances. The biggest creatures, such as tapirs and toucans – which have suffered significant losses from hunting – disperse the seeds of the longestlived hardwood trees, which sequester the most carbon. Hardwood trees are being replaced with softwood trees, which have smaller seeds and store less carbon. Researchers looked at the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil, where 95% of trees need animals to disperse seeds. The paper suggests between 10% to 15% of carbon stored in the original forest has been lost.
Extreme weather makes land restoration even harder
A third of climate mitigation over the next decade could come from restoring nature so that it can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ocean, soils and vegetation. Several scientific papers propose mass treeplanting as a way to store more carbon. However, hot weather and drought makes land restoration harder. The UK’s chief plant health officer warned in 2022 that the country’s tree-planting ambitions were at risk because of drought. Arid conditions leave young saplings susceptible to disease, and the climate crisis is also causing certain pests to thrive.
Extreme weather is pushing
people into new areas
Last year, the number of people displaced around the world topped 100 million for the first time, according to the UN. The climate crisis is one of the reasons for people being displaced, alongside political conflicts, poverty and lack of resources. In north-west Africa, rising sea levels, drought and desertification are forcing more people to leave their homes. In South Asia, increased temperatures, more frequent cyclones and flooding caused by melting glaciers are among the drivers of human migration. Among many other problems, the displacement of people risks disturbing areas that were previously wild, particularly where there is a lack of essential services such as waste removal and water.
The amount of land needed to grow food is expanding
The climate crisis means that regions previously unsuitable for farming are now suitable for agriculture, which could have a significant impact on nature, according to research published in 2020. These new agricultural “frontiers” are located mostly in upper latitudes in the northern hemisphere and tropical mountain regions, including in the tropical Andes, central Asia and the Horn of Africa. Many of these regions harbour global biodiversity hotspots as well as critical bird habitats, researchers say.
Find more age of extinction coverage here
rado shrublands, trees that are home to myriad insects and orchids, soils teeming with fungi and micro-organisms, and land that jaguars and toucans inhabited for millennia are being brutally lost. The drivers of biodiversity loss are real, and there for anyone to see. Science provides powerful solutions, but time is running out.”
To counteract the potential loss, research indicates humanity must work to restore nature across the planet, adopt more environmentally friendly farming practices, reduce meat consumption, stop the spread of invasive species and dramatically cut the use of fossil fuels.
At the Cop15 biodiversity summit last December, governments agreed on 23 targets, including the restoration of 30% of the planet’s degraded terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine ecosystems. So far, governments have never met any of their self-imposed targets on nature loss, and experts say that must change urgently.
‘One word: desert’
Sandra Myrna Díaz, an Argentinian biologist who co-chaired the 2019 IPBES assessment of the state of the planet, said: “Over the past 50 years, the most significant driver of biodiversity decline has been, by far, landuse change.
“If these trends continue in the next decades, soil health is likely to deteriorate further due to erosion by intensive annual cropping, [with] pollution by biocides and salinisation. The proportion of nature in direct contact with the wider public will continue shrinking.”
Humanity has cleared about a third of all forests for farming over the past 10,000 years, researchers estimate, destroying key ecosystems such as tropical rainforests, which are among the most biodiverse on the planet.
But experts warn that unique arid landscapes are also at risk. Emma Archer, a professor of geography and environmental science at the University of Pretoria, said: “South Africa’s Karoo landscape is changing, shaped by changing farming systems, increased investments in mining and renewable energy, and by climate change.
“Unless we better understand and address how these different factors are interacting to impact this precious biodiverse landscape – including one of the most biodiverse desert ecosystems in the world – the outcomes will be severe.”
The consequences of land-use change are often interlinked with other drivers of biodiversity loss, warns Cristiane Julião, from the Brazilian Amazon’s Indigenous Pankararu people. “If we do not take the necessary actions to conserve biodiversity, the world’s future and that of our people can be described in one word: desert.
“The Brazilian Amazon, where my people live, would become a desert if the global economic system continues to prioritise exploitation and profit over the health of our planet and people. If we don’t shift the current course of development now, it will be the end of our knowledge, practices and traditions that animals, plants and the climate depend on.”
Invasive species on the march
Last month, an expert UN assessment warned that invasive species had become a multibillion-dollar problem, which is expected to worsen without action on conservation. At least 3,500 harmful invasive species have been recorded globally, spread by human travel and trade, and they are playing an increased role in natural disasters such as August’s deadly wildfires in Hawaii.
Aníbal Pauchard, professor of forest science at the University of Concepción, who helped lead the expert UN assessment, said that without action, by 2050 Chile “will have lost its ecological uniqueness and will be less suitable for nature and people.” About a quarter of Chile’s biodiversity is not found anywhere else on Earth due to natural barriers including the Atacama desert, the Andes and the Pacific Ocean.
Invasive species have become a threat to that, Pauchard said. “Overabundant invasive alien species … will have replaced the unique local ecosystems, causing some native species, especially those endemic to Chile, to go extinct, and others strongly reduced in their numbers.”
Hanno Seebens, from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, said the warming climate and spread of invasive species could see disease-carrying animals reach new ecosystems in Europe. “Continuing warming due to climate change will allow disease-transmitting species such as the Tiger mosquito … to spread across Europe.”
If nothing changed, Seebens said, the number of invasive species in Europe is expected to double by 2050.
In North America, without increased biosecurity measures, invasive species will threaten human health, native biodiversity and the economy, warned Prof Peter Stoett, who cochaired the UN assessment on invasive species, which took place over more than four years.
“Invasive grasses will continue to contribute to combustion and forest fires; coastal invasions will further threaten fisheries; climate change is probably going to expand the northward range of zebra mussels and other invaders in the Great Lakes, and there are special concerns about the vulnerability of the Arctic in general,” he said. “This entire ecosystem will change without intensification of control efforts.”
‘Global cooperation is crucial’
Researchers estimate that humans would need 1.7 planet Earths to sustain the current rate of consumption. With more resources required for the greenenergy transition, experts say mining firms need to find new extraction methods that minimise damage to nature.
Dr Charles Barber, senior biodiversity adviser at the World Resources Institute (WRI), said: “The boom in mining for the green-energy transition will send miners into the last biodiversity refuges over the next 25 years. Those minerals will get dug up, and we need them. To avoid a biodiversity catastrophe, we need to develop ways to mine far different from the environmentally and socially destructive methods of yesterday and today.”
Unai Pascual, from the Basque Centre for Climate Change, said population growth and urbanisation would put further strain on demand for resources if not managed properly, adding that proper management should ensure there was space for nature in urban areas.
Pascual said: “More than two-thirds of the projected population of 10 billion people will live in cities by 2050. This will increase the energy requirements to manage the growing complexity of urban metabolism. Cities will also increase demand for the extraction of natural resources … with dire risks for the health of ecosystems. A growing share of the population will disconnect from nature, both physically and psychologically.
“If we do not act effectively now to protect and enhance urban biodiversity,” Pascual added, “we will likely see more severe human suffering, especially by the world’s most vulnerable urban inhabitants.”
***
After decades of overfishing of key species for human consumption, the collapse of fisheries is highlighted as a threat by several experts, especially given the risks from global heating. Dr Jean-Marc Fromentin, from the marine protection body UMR Marbec, said: “Without decisive action, the ocean’s productivity and consequently the world fish catch is set to decline sharply due to seawater warming and acidification caused by climate change.
“This decline will be especially severe in tropical oceans, where wild fish are essential to the food security of local coastal communities,” he said.
Surangel Whipps Jr, president of the Pacific country of Palau and cochair of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, said the world could learn from his country’s customs: “Palau’s bul tradition, a sustainable practice of pausing fishing to replenish stocks, has nourished our generations.
“Global cooperation is crucial,” he said. “Sustainability measures within our exclusive economic zone alone can’t guarantee the world’s ability to provide food, air and water.”
‘Groundwater that can never be cleaned’
The buildup of plastics, chemicals, pesticides and fertilisers in natural ecosystems is highlighted as a threat to biodiversity that demands immediate action, experts say. Dr Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, which works to reduce plastic pollution, said action was vital to avoid flooding key ecosystems with more waste.
“When we published our global estimate of microplastic in the world’s oceans, averaging 170tn particles, we also discovered an alarming and increasing trend. This number would easily quadruple by 2050, likely exceeding the capacity of Earth systems to deal with that level of pollution,” he said.
“This underscores the importance of a strong UN global treaty on plastic pollution, which is being debated now. We cannot recycle our way out of this mess.”
Federico Maggi from the University of Sydney, said: “On the world’s crops and fields, about 3m tonnes of pesticides are used every year to control unwanted plants, fungi and bacteria. Of this amount applied in fields, 82% is biodegraded to simpler molecules currently not fully characterised for their environmental and biodiversity effects. Of the remainder, 10% stays in the soil, while 8% leaches to aquifers.”
The pesticide residues that remain maintain their essential function, he said, “hence reducing biodiversity wherever they are transported … reducing earthworm populations, amphibians, pollinators and many other non-target organisms”.
James Dalton, director of the IUCN global water programme, said the impact of human pollution was also being seen underground, in the world’s groundwater. “We use [water] and often don’t put it back where it came from, meaning we don’t recharge the groundwater with any excess water we took out and didn’t use,” he said.
“The water we use, we pollute, and some of those pollutants go back into the ground. This then slowly infiltrates into our future water supply – sometimes permanently. In the US, they have polluted groundwater that can never be cleaned (think Erin Brockovich).
“The future holds difficult choices,” he said. He called for: “far better regulation of groundwater use; far, far stricter controls on pollutants and monitoring of pollutants; leaving some areas of the planet free from development on the land to protect the water resources underneath.”
‘Huge shift in marine ecosystems’
While climate change poses a direct threat to humanity, it also presents a major threat to swathes of life on Earth, often in unforeseen ways, warn researchers. Henry Häkkinen, a postdoctoral fellow at ZSL’s Institute of Zoology, said: “Seabirds in Europe already face a lot of problems – invasive predators, entanglement with fishing gear, and avian influenza severely threaten their populations, among many other threats. But now our seas are warming up, and this is causing a huge shift in how marine ecosystems function.
Many seabirds rely on these cold-water species, especially during the breeding season, and if their food disappears, so too will the seabirds.”
Juan Lucas Restrepo, director general of Alliance of Bioversity International, warned that the climate crisis could present a major challenge to future food supplies in south Asia. “Climate change will continue to be a major driver of changes of [south Asian] ecosystems in the coming decades.
“Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts and extreme climate events are already modifying the natural habitat where many crop species grow … with negative impacts on yields and food security.
“This is a huge threat to environmental, social and economic sustainability in the region. If this trend continues, it will limit food availability and increase food prices, resulting in rising undernourishment.”
Susan Chomba, director of vital landscapes for Africa at the WRI, said navigating the threats posed by the climate crisis in Africa and its ecosystems would have international consequences. “The world can’t solve the hunger crisis, nor the climate crisis, without Africa.
“But today we’re facing a perfect storm: almost 60% of the continent’s arable land is degraded. Over 280 million Africans face hunger. Climate-driven droughts and cyclones are wiping out development gains made in the past decades. Staying on this path will hurt countries’ economies and decimate one of our biggest carbon sinks, the Congo basin.”
Chomba concluded: “Hope lies in the 33 million smallholder farmers who produce over 70% of the food for the continent and export. From Niger to Kenya, these farmers are making major leaps, restoring degraded land into productive farms that grow healthy foods that are rich in biodiversity and are major carbon sinks. Throughout Africa, we’re seeing hope for a new path.”
The following experts also provided their views and helped shape this article:Josef Serttele,Joe Millard,Balkisou Buba,Rukka Sombolinggi,Cristiane Fontes,Charlotte Couch,Erin Matson,Terry Hughes,Stephanie Roe,Zitouni Ould-Dada,Eduardo BrondizioandChris Carbone
Find more age of extinction coverage here
The proportion of nature in direct contact with the wider public will continue shrinking
Sandra Myrna Díaz, biologist
valent dementia symptoms, while the analysis of late-onset dementia looked at people aged 65 or older at the end of the research period. The research looked at the data of UK Biobank participants between 2007 and 2010, and later followed up in 2022.
The study, authored by Rui Li and colleagues, collected data of these individuals’ household income, highest education qualification and employment status in order to determine their socioeconomic status. The data also looked at the extent of a participant’s healthy lifestyle assessed through a score that looked at smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity and diet.
The results found that individuals of a lower socioeconomic status had a three-times-higher risk of developing early-onset dementia in comparison to their counterparts from a higher socioeconomic background. Of these results, less than 12% of cases could be explained by lifestyle factors, suggesting that individuals from a lower socioeconomic background living a healthier lifestyle wouldn’t necessarily mitigate the risk of developing earlyonset dementia.
Dementia is one of the biggest illnesses facing UK health infrastructure, with a study from last month suggesting that 1.7 million people in the UK could have the condition by 2040. In the UK, about 900,000 people are living with dementia, while more than 70,800 are living with early-onset dementia. Worldwide, studies have suggested that about 3.9 million people aged between 30 and 64 have early-onset dementia, with 370,000 people newly diagnosed each year. Early-onset dementia is when a person experiences dementia symptoms under the age of 65.
The research also found that people from a lower socioeconomic background who lived an unhealthy lifestyle had a 440% higher risk of developing early-onset dementia compared with those from a higher socioeconomic background who lived a healthy lifestyle. It was also found that that socioeconomic status and lifestyle factors had a stronger association with early-onset dementia compared with late onset dementia.
The authors of the study said their research was among the first to examine the link between socioeconomic status, healthy lifestyle factors and early-onset dementia.
Although the study demonstrated the link between early-onset dementia and socioeconomic status, the research was limited by the fact that the sample was limited in regards to ethnic diversity, as more than 85% of participants were from a European background.
Tommaso Filippini, a public health researcher who was not involved in the study, said the finding confirmed “the importance of promoting healthy lifestyles from a young age, along with the independent role of factors including socioeconomic status in earlyonset dementia and overall dementia incidence”.
He added: “The findings suggest that efforts to reduce social disparities are strongly warranted to decrease dementia incidence … this study highlights that both social disparities and unhealthy lifestyles could have detrimental effects on overall dementia risk.”
Nexon. News site VGC sums the whole thing up. I’m not getting involved.
The editors of a new anthology of video game writing have appeared to suggest that nothing like this had ever been attempted before. Naturally, this led to considerable consternation among the people behind the many anthologies of video game writing produced over the last 30 years. Gita Jackson has a good summary of the controversy, which also traces the routes of subjective games criticism.
Tetris puts me in a state of zen. If only it did the same for my family
Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection review – a great way to relive a lost world of gaming
‘I played video games with a voracious appetite’: writer Carmen Maria Machado on being a lifelong gamer
Question Block
This week we have a short and simple question from @Cuddy75 on Twitter, who asked:
“Why don’t games go out of copyright like books or music? That would mean any game over X years old could be remade.”
I went straight to Alex Tutty at legal firm Sheridans, which has years of experience in the video games sector, with this question. “The answer is that they do go out of copyright just the same as books and music,” he said. “The key elements of copyright in a game are the visual representation of the game as an artistic work (like a picture or a photo) and the source code which is protected as a literary work (like a book). So a game is really a collection of pictures and words (just in source code form).
“The length of copyright protection in these is typically the artist’s life plus 70 years, and so games will go out of copyright. However, as most of the developers are still alive and none have been dead for 70 years, they are still in copyright protection.”
This means games won’t start to drift out of copyright until around 2050, when the earliest titles will be subject to expiry. Until then, copyright law makes it difficult to legally transfer older games to new storage media, which means that many copyright-expired games may be unsalvageable by 2050. In the meantime, there is the legally ambiguous concept of abandonware – game code which is freely available online, as the developers and publishers are now defunct. And 40 years of software piracy and emulation has ensured that the ROMs of thousands of classic games are online, if you know where to look.
Whatever the case, if you want to see a legally sound remake of Jet Set Willy that removes the legendary game-breaking Attic bug, you have a long wait ahead.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com