Advanced satellite imagery reveals since 2000, 1.9 million km of ecologically intact land – which is an area estimated to be about the size of Mexico — has been lost. More than 58% of the Earth’s land surface is under intense human pressure which is leading to drastic declines in wildlife population, according to the 2020 Living Planet Report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) last week.
Only 25% of the global terrestrial area, located in just a handful of countries – Russia, Canada, Brazil and Australia – contain most of the places without a human footprint – “the last remaining terrestrial wilderness areas on our planet”. Most of the losses occurred within the tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannah and shrubland ecosystems, and the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
“Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in millions of years. The way we produce and consume food and energy, and the blatant disregard for the environment entrenched in our current economic model, has pushed the natural world to its limits,” Marco Lambertini, Director General, WWF International highlights.
And diseases like COVID-19 is a clear manifestation of our broken relationship with nature. The pandemic brings to fore “the deep interconnection between nature, human health and well-being, and how unprecedented biodiversity loss threatens the health of both people and the planet.”
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Digging deep into the report
The erosion of these intact ecosystems is essentially irreversible and has profound impacts on species — researchers recorded an average drop of 68% in population sizes of more than 20,000 mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptile species in the period between 1970 and 2016. Land conversion for agriculture, illegal wildlife trade, and overconsumption of natural resources were identified as the primary drivers behind habitat destruction and wildlife population decline. A 94% decline in the Living Planet Index (LPI) for the tropical subregions of the Americas is the largest fall observed in any part of the world.
The past 50 years of industrialization led by explosion in global trade, consumption and human population growth and an enormous move towards urbanization has to this increase in human footprint on ecology. While until 1970, humanity’s ecological footprint was smaller than the Earth’s rate of regeneration, currently to feed and fuel economies and lifestyles, we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56%.
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This is validated by the United Nations Environment Programme data, which shows that our per capita global stock of natural capital has declined by nearly 40% since the early 1990s, while produced capital has doubled and human capital has increased by 13%. Land-use change due to where and how we produce food, is one of the biggest threats humans pose to biodiversity. Our oceans are also heating up melting ice, overfishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change causing a growing spectrum of adverse effects across marine ecosystems.
As Lambertini underlines, there is an opportunity to heal our relationship with nature and mitigate risks of future pandemics but “this better future starts with the decisions that governments, companies and people around the world take today.”
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