EXTENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
IF YOU drove your car at dusk 30 years ago, you would probably need to clean the windshield frequently.
But that’s no longer the case, says Scott Mcart, a professor of entomology at Cornell University. Scientists have coined a new phrase, the “windshield effect”, to describe insect declines, he explains.
“Insect pollinators are unfortunately an excellent example of the problems caused by human activities... We’re generally having a negative impact on the environment, which is leading to population declines and extinctions of many species including corals, frogs, bees and butterflies.”
He was commenting on the findings of a watershed 1 500-page report by the Un-backed Intergovernmental Science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
On Monday, a 40-page summary of the IPBES Global Assessment was released in Paris, laying bare how humanity is destroying the ecosystems that underpin their lives. It warns how one million species of plants and animals are threatened with human-induced extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history. The intensity of the drivers of biodiversity loss must be halted. “Without such action there will be a further acceleration in the global rate of species extinction, which is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years,” reads the summary report.
Described as the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, it’s based on a review of 15 000 scientific and government sources and was compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries, including SA.
They found overwhelming evidence that human activities are behind the “dangerous” and “unprecedented” decline of the natural world. “Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing,” says Professor Josef Settele, a co-chair.
“The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”
The rate of global change in nature during the past 50 years has been unprecedented in human history. In this period, the human population has doubled, the global economy has grown nearly four-fold and global trade has grown 10-fold, together driving up the demands for energy and materials.
Economic incentives, however, have favoured expanding economic activity, and often environmental harm, over conservation or restoration.
“While more food, energy and materials than ever before are now being supplied to people in most places, this is increasingly at the expense of nature’s ability to provide such contributions in the future and frequently undermines nature’s many other contributions,” say the authors.
The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has plummeted by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. “More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened.”
Biodiversity – the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems – is declining faster than at any time in human history. The implications are manifold, says Belinda Reyers, a co-ordinating lead author of the Global Assessment, and professor in sustainability science at Stellenbosch University. “The food we eat, the clean water we drink and the air we breathe can all be traced back to a species or ecosystem either pollinating our crops, regulating water flows, or purifying our air.
“Some of these may be replaceable, but many are not. Everything is connected – and so losing species or part of an ecosystem will have impacts on people.”
Coastal communities are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events through the deterioration of coral reefs, mangroves and foredunes that once protected them. The impacts of declines in species and ecosystems are inequitably distributed, with those who can least afford it bearing the highest cost, Reyers explains.
“The ongoing crisis in our neighbouring countries from the impacts of Cyclone Idai are just one such example linking climate change, ecosystem degradation and ongoing food insecurity. For those of us living more wealthy buffered lives, we may not think we feel these impacts as directly (yet), but IPBES highlights that we are all being impacted by these declines in less material, but no less significant ways – through our mental well-being, our health, our culture and our identity eroding as we lose nature and important connections with nature. We are all poorer for this loss.”
The world has agreed to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, which aim to make the world fairer, more prosperous and sustainable for current and future generations, but IPBES’ work has found current declines in nature and ecosystem services will “undermine our global ability to meet many of these goals, in some cases actually preventing their achievement”.
This will not only harm development efforts in low-income countries but the knock-on effects through migration, food price shocks, and political unrest “will have ripple effects around the world – some of which we can already see and feel in SA and elsewhere”.
SA, she explains, is a microcosm of the global challenge.
“Despite increasing efforts to conserve biodiversity by significant increases in our protected area estate (a global trend also found in IPBES), the big drivers of change that IPBES found are also at work in SA – land and sea-use change, over-exploitation of species, climate change, pollution and invasive species.”
Protected areas are not enough to stem the losses from these big forces. “Industrial agriculture, urban and
◆ Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions
◆ More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production
◆ The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980
◆ Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to $577 billion (R8 trillion) in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million transport infrastructure, mining, pollution and many other activities are changing the face of the world and South African landscapes, ecosystems and species with consequences for our health, our well-being and our society.”
There are better ways to grow food, build cities, mine, sustainably use species and develop society that have “lighter impacts on the environment and share the benefits more widely”, but the examples in SA are small and fragmented, says Reyers.
It’s about how nature is valued in business, policy and society. “This is not monetary value but rather how we account for the benefits from nature, people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection
◆ In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished
◆ Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992
◆ Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilisers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean “dead zones”. Source: IPBES and the costs of its deterioration, in our day-to-day activities. At present those are treated as invisible, ignored and deferred to others and to future generations.”
For those not feeling the immediate impacts, “it’s time to think about who is bearing the costs of our impacts on species and ecosystems through the lifestyle and consumer choices we’re making. Impacts that may even be happening in countries and places far distant from where we live, which provide your food, the palm oil in your soap or chocolate bar, your clothes, your furniture and your cellphone”.
Professor Nick King, an environmental futurist and global change analyst and strategist, who was in Paris for the IPBES meeting, agrees. “Cumulatively, the stats in the report tell us we are long past the tipping points of the optimal health and functioning of numerous components of the natural world, which provide the ecosystem services which enable and support all human endeavour.
“For far too long humanity has considered itself somehow separate from, and not dependent upon, these services from the natural world, which is of course simply ludicrous. The report makes it abundantly clear that only urgent, transformative change in the way we view ‘development’, our economic system, which incentivises rapacious exploitation and destruction of natural resources, and encourages overconsumption, and addressing human population growth, will have the necessary transformative impact.”
All the drivers of these natural resources losses and degradation are driven by human numbers, human consumption, and an economic system which encourages “unfettered growth” in these.
“Unless we recognise this and catalyse frank, honest conversations around what sort of world we want to create and what sort of world we want to leave to future generations, we are heading for a very unpleasant future – both right now for us, and of course, for them.
“SA is clearly right at the forefront of all this, with arguably the world’s most unequal society, massive unemployment with a population youth bulge continuously exacerbating this, huge water pollution and water and land access problems. (We have) a vast legacy of land, biodiversity and social destruction driven by the extractives sector, which is still not only not being held accountable but actively encouraged to continue, an unacceptable per capita carbon footprint contributing unfairly to climate change, which is devastating our agricultural productivity, and pinning much of our future prospects on tourism while destroying the very resource base of biodiversity upon which this depends.”
The IPBES report should be a “momentous wake-up call” for politicians everywhere regarding the need for urgent change, King says.