2022 and why nature is not doomed yet...
WHAT does 2022 hold for wildlife? With report after report headlining the decline of wildlife you might be forgiven for thinking that all is lost under the pressures of human activity and global warming.
Perhaps though things are not as bad as they seem.
Nature is very resilient. Unlike humans it does not have favoured species, either for aesthetic, or utilitarian reasons. Ecosystems will survive but the species which comprise them will change.
It is only in the last 50 years that we have developed the tools to do the counting on a large scale. Our baselines are the numbers in the mid 20th century. For millennia before that populations and species came and went unnoticed.
One group we do know a lot about is birds. The RSPB’s Farmland Bird Index shows that the 19 species included have declined by an average of nearly 50% in 50 years.
Six species have actually increased (woodpigeons and jackdaws more than doubled) but turtle doves, grey partridges, corn buntings and tree sparrows have declined by over 80%.
Farmland, however, is not a natural habitat: the populations of some of those birds were artificially high to start with. Ironically, a new project in Worcestershire to help them is, in effect, farming the birds.
On the other hand the birds of another man-made habitat, suburbia, with some exceptions, are generally doing very well. As a nation of bird feeders we are keeping numbers of blue, great and coal tits, robins, dunnock and goldfinches artificially high. Our activities produce both winners and losers.
We should be concerned about what is happening to wildlife, not least because as well as causing it problems we are able to devise solutions. The doom mongers seem to assume that current trends will continue unabated.
Chronic problems though generate feedback mechanisms which help to turn the tide; for example there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of wildlife conservation projects worldwide, including many here in the West Midlands.
So, apocalypse now? Maybe not just yet.