On Monday, COP16 — the 16th UN Biodiversity Conference — will open in Cali, Colombia.
It is the first of three UN conferences this fall that are addressing individually the three components of what the UN calls the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
COP16 will be followed in short succession by the 29th UN Conference on Climate Change, which takes place in Baku, Azerbaijan from Nov. 11-21, and then the final round of negotiations on a global plastics treaty — plastic being a key pollutant, although far from the only one — in Busan, South Korea from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1.
These three issues are also three of the nine components of the Planetary Boundaries model I discussed last week; we have crossed the boundary for all three, and the trend is worsening for all three.
Moreover, they don’t operate in isolation, but interact in ways that usually make things worse. Biodiversity loss, for example, is driven by five main factors, according to a landmark 2019 UN report, two of which are climate change and pollution.
While climate change is often seen as the main — and sometimes, the only — threat, biodiversity loss is really fundamental.
As Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, the president for COP16, noted in an interview with John Woodside in Canada’s National Observer: “If nature collapses, communities and people will also collapse. Society will collapse.”
Troublingly, nature is getting closer to collapsing. That same 2019 report found that “around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.”
And just this past week, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) released the latest Living Planet Report, sub-titled “A System in Peril”.
The report uses the Living Planet Index, which is based on a count of the population size for almost 35,000 routinely monitored populations representing 5,495 vertebrate species — amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles.
While it is only a portion of overall biodiversity, it is an important one, in part because of its longevity. The index covers a 50-year period from 1970-2020 and has been trending steadily downwards throughout that time.
Thus, while the result this year is disturbing, it is hardly surprising: “the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73 percent,” the WWF reports — so nearly three-quarters of those vertebrate populations have gone in just 50 years!
“Nature,” the report bluntly states, “is disappearing at an alarming rate.”
But that is the global average; it is much worse in some regions and among some ecosystems.
Freshwater vertebrate populations — think fish, reptiles and amphibians — “have suffered the heaviest declines, falling by 85 percent,” while “the fastest declines have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean — a concerning 95 percent decline — followed by Africa (76 percent).”
By comparison, North America seemingly fares well, with “only” a 39 per cent decline, as does Europe and Central Asia (35 per cent down).
However, the authors caution, that is misleading because “large-scale impacts on nature were already apparent before 1970,” which is when the index begins.
The authors caution us that population declines of this scale may compromise the resilience of ecosystems, threatening their functioning, which in turn “undermines the benefits that ecosystems provide to people.”
And they warn that “a number of tipping points [substantial, often abrupt and potentially irreversible changes] are highly likely if current trends … continue, with potentially catastrophic consequences” for both societies and the Earth’s living systems.
As do a number of recent reports, the WWF concludes that to restore resilience, balance and vitality to the natural systems that are our life support systems, we need not just a transition but transformative change, in particular in “our food, energy and finance systems.”
This will not be easy, but the longer we put off the necessary transformations, the steeper the price we will have to pay in health, social and economic terms.
Indeed, the WWF believes that “It is no exaggeration to say that what happens in the next five years will determine the future of life on Earth.”
As the slogan for the recent Seniors Climate Action Day put it, “Later is too late!”
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
