Humanity’s last chance

As I write this, the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate

Change (COP 24) is currently under way in

Warsaw, Poland. Just this morning, Johannesburg was issued with a severe weather warning for heatwave conditions that will persist for almost half the week. There is, of course, nothing unusual about heatwaves in summer, but you would have to be supremely ignorant to deny the fact that while things still remain mostly the same year-on-year, the climate and environment have undoubtedly changed when observed over longer periods.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change ( see pg 6) summarises some of the alarming effects that global warming has already had, and will continue to have, on biodiversity and ecosystems. A major talking point at COP 24 will be the actions required by nations and individuals to try to cap global warming to around 1,5˚C. Even at this increase, the changes in the world will be catastrophic, but they may just be manageable.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report compares the impact that 1,5°C of global warming would have on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species loss and extinction, with the impact 2°C of global warming would have on the environment. Of the 105 000 species studied, 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose over half of their climatically determined geographic range for global warming of 1,5°C, compared with 18% of insects, 16% of plants and 8% of vertebrates for global warming of 2°C.

In more sensitive areas, such as the tropics, where the rise of temperature and other climate warming-related weather changes may be even more severe, the habitat and species losses may be much greater than currently anticipated.

A new report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warns that arthropods (invertebrates with external skeletons) are declining at an alarming rate. For the report, researchers compared arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest with data taken during the 1970s and found that biomass had fallen 10 to 60 times. “Our analyses revealed synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods. Over the past 30 years, forest temperatures have risen 2°C, and our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web,” the report states.

For the time being, the effect of climate change is still incremental and, as a result, most of us have fallen victim to what the New York Times calls the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ in its recent article, ‘The Insect Apocalypse is Here’. The syndrome is defined as “a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment”. But, make no mistake, we are living in our ‘last-chance’ moment, and if our generation fails to make far-reaching and urgent changes to the way in which we live and consume natural resources, the end result will be mass extinction.