UN report says nature in more trouble than ever News
Myriams-Fotos / Pixabay
UN report says nature in more trouble than ever

In the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, the UN announced the release of its Global Assessment report Monday, pointing to over 1 million species currently threatened with extinction, declining at an alarming, accelerating rate. A 40-page policy summary was released Monday, and the full 1,000+ page report will be released this week.

According to the summary, 75 percent percent of the world’s terrestrial environment has been “severely altered” to date by human actions (marine environments: 66 percent); More than 85 percent of wetlands that were present in 1700 had been lost by 2000, and the loss of wetlands is currently three times faster, in percentage terms, than forest loss. More than one-third of reef-forming corals, sharks and shark relatives, and marine mammals are currently threatened with extinction. The current rate of global species extinction is ten to hundreds of times higher compared to the average over the last 10 million years, and the rate is accelerating.

The report highlights policy tools that could support sustainability and reverse this course in agriculture, marine systems, freshwater systems, and urban areas. It offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades, and not all of them are bleak.

“The Report tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global,” said Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Chair, Sir Robert Watson in a press release. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably—this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

The assessment’s authors ranked the five direct drivers of change in nature with the largest relative global impacts so far: in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

The report was the culmination of more than 450 researchers using more than 15,000 scientific and government reports, and it had to be approved by representatives from 109 nations.

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