09 May 2019 - UN report warns that 1 million species face extinction
One million species facing extinction, posing a risk to human well-being: UN report
Ivan Semeniuk, Science Reporter (The Globe and Mail, 06/05/2019)
Around the world, nature and the benefits it provides are in unprecedented decline – a trend that can be reversed, but only with a co-ordinated international effort and “transformative change” to the way humans draw food, water, energy and resources from the planet, a sweeping new report has found.
The report encompasses the first global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the international body tasked with pulling together the current state of knowledge on environmental degradation and the risk it poses to humanity.
The portrait it paints is a stark one, including an estimated one million species of plants and animals facing extinction, many within a matter of decades, under a business-as-usual scenario.
Nature is in its worst shape in human history, UN report says
The Associated Press (CBC, 06/05/2019)
Nature is in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over one million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday in the UN's first comprehensive report on biodiversity.
It's all because of humans, but it's not too late to fix the problem, the report by the United Nations says.
Species loss is accelerating to a rate tens or hundreds of times faster than in the past, the report said. More than half a million species on land "have insufficient habitat for long-term survival" and are likely to go extinct, many within decades, unless their habitats are restored. The oceans are not any better off.
Scientists say it's not too late to save biodiversity after release of report
(Global News, 06/05/2019)
International scientists said Monday that it was not too late to save biodiversity after the release of a report that says one million animal and plant species are at imminent risk of extinction.
Biodiversity threat won’t be tackled by alarmist biologist hype and dismantling capitalism
Matt Ridley (Reaction, 07/05/2019)
Driven perhaps by envy at the attention that climate change is getting, and ambition to set up a great new intergovernmental body that can fly scientists to mega-conferences, biologists have gone into overdrive on the subject of biodiversity this week.
They are right that there is a lot wrong with the world’s wildlife, that we can do much more to conserve, enhance and recover it, but much of the coverage in the media, and many of the pronouncements of Sir Bob Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), are frankly weird.
The threat to biodiversity is not new, not necessarily accelerating, mostly not caused by economic growth or prosperity, nor by climate change, and won’t be reversed by retreating into organic self-sufficiency. Here’s a few gentle correctives.
We are full of bright ideas to solve ecological problems. So let’s act on them
Chris Packham (The Guardian, 06/05/2019)
A new UN report is set to reveal that up to 1m species face extinction because of human actions. The loss of pollinating insects and other ecological disasters – from the destruction of flood-saving mangroves to air pollution – poses no less of a threat than climate change, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
We are triggering a mass extinction event, and critically we cannot separate one environmental crisis from another. Biodiversity loss cannot be partitioned from climate change, or from human population growth or pollution or plastics in our oceans. These challenges are all interconnected. We face an ecology of environmental concerns, and if we continue to consider these problems in partitioned isolation, solutions will continue to emerge far too slowly.