Humanity has wiped out 60% of wildlife in 44 years

It’s now emergency that threatens civilisation

Humanity has wiped out 60 per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970 to 2014, 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 WWF report 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. Latin America was hit hardest, seeing a nearly 90 per cent loss of wildlife over the same period.

Another dataset confirmed the depth of an unfolding mass extinction event, only the sixth in the last half-billion years. Depending on which of Earth’s lifeforms are included, the current rate of 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.

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 yesterday.

From 1970 to 2014, 60 per cent 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 per cent loss of wildlife over the same period.

Another dataset confirmed the depth of an unfolding mass extinction event, only the sixth in the last half-billion 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 per cent) and livestock (60 per cent) making up the rest.

Scary statistics

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 and one of 59 co-authors of the 80-page report.

“Unlike population declines, extinctions are irreversible.”

For corals, it may already be too late.

Back-to-back marine heatwaves have already wiped out up to half of the globe’s shallow-water reefs, which support a quarter of all marine life.

Half-a-century of conservation efforts have scored spectacular successes, with significant recoveries among tigers, manatees, grizzly bears, bluefin tuna and bald eagles.

But the onslaught of hunting, shrinking habitat, pollution, illegal trade and climate change — all caused by humans — has been too much to overcome, Lambertini acknowledged.