Ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow and the 2021 UN Biodiversity Conference researchers have issued a stark warning that global biodiversity has fallen below the ‘safe limit’.
Scientists at London’s Natural History Museum have found that ‘biodiversity intactness’, the proportion of species in an area that retain their abundance, has fallen below the 90% average set as a ‘safe limit’.
Scientists looked at ecological data from around the world covering over 58,0000 species of plants, animals, and fungi to create a matric known as the Biodiversity Intactness Index.
This was then used to model scenarios for how biodiversity could change up to 2050 ranging from ‘taking the green road’, where the world gradually moves towards a more sustainable future; and ‘taking the highway’, where fossil fuels continue to be used to drive growth.
The UK emerges from the analysis as being in the bottom 10% of countries with only half of its biodiversity remaining intact, making it one of the most nature depleted countries in the world.
This has been attributed to the effects of two centuries of intensive industrialization and agriculture.
Katia Sanchez Ortiz, one of the researchers who complied the biodiversity intactness index for the UK late last year said at the time things were ‘looking very bad’, adding that the decline has been going on for so long we have come to see what are ‘altered landscapes as being their natural state, when in reality they were already heavily depleted of their wildlife’.
Professor Andy Purvis, who led the research project for the National History Museum said that loss of biodiversity has the potential to be ‘just as catastrophic as climate change’, adding that ‘muddling through’ as the world’s nations are now will not be enough to turn the situation around.
Speaking to the BBC earlier this week Professor Purvis emphasised the importance of biodiversity in providing the basics necessary for the survival of human and other life on the planet, drawing a parallel with recent Brexit related supply-chain problems, he said "It's the foundation of our society. We've seen recently how disruptive it can be when supply chains break down - nature is at the base of our supply chains”.
Researchers at the Natural History Museum have developed a tool for tracking changes in biodiversity.
The Biodiversity Trends Explorer uses data on the abundance of plants, fungi and animals to map how local and global biodiversity is responding to pressures put on it by human activity .
World leaders will shortly attend a virtual summit on biodiversity hosted by China, COP15, ahead of face-to-face talks set to be held in Kunming next April, the UK is also playing host to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow at the end of this month.
At the Kunming summit world leaders will negotiate setting up a framework for protecting nature and species for the next decade that could see 30% of the worlds land and oceans protected for conservation.
Speaking to the BBC Andrew Deutz global policy lead at the Nature Conservancy said that in relation to biodiversity as with the climate emergency “what happens over the next year will - to a large extent - set humanity's course for the rest of the decade; and what happens this decade is likely to define our prospects for the rest of this century."
Also speaking to the BBC RSPB chief executive Beccy Speight said "To play our part, we need the UK to step up and turn our global promises into action at home, to show that we are not going to let another lost decade for nature slip past."
Biodiversity is currently declining at a faster rate than at any previous time in human history, there has been an average 70% decline in mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. A quarter of the worlds animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.
The window for turning around the damage done by a catastrophic decline in biodiversity and climate change is still open but getting ever narrower. The message to world leaders ahead of the COP15 and COP26 summits couldn’t be clearer, to delay action any longer risks triggering what researchers at the National History Museum starkly describe as ‘ecological meltdown’.