Ni Kunoma

If we look into the past, about 56 million years ago, we find a moment, a thin line in the geologic record where the course of life on Earth was altered. Carbon in the atmosphere soared. Global temperatures rapidly rose by 6°C. Weather got more extreme and huge numbers of our planet life forms disappeared forever. The Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is one of the most radical climate events ever unearthed. The mass extinction that followed was triggered, at least in part, by an injection of greenhouse gases into the air.

*Humans wouldn’t risk dying out during the PETM because we didn’t exist, but now we do.*

Extinction is a fact of life. But the crisis we currently face is of a scale never before seen since our species arrived on Earth – and this time, it’s because of us. Today, one million species are threatened with extinction. While one extinction is a tragedy, a million risks being just another statistic. So let’s break down what this really means.

One in eight non-microbial life forms on Earth could disappear, many within decades.

*More than 40% of amphibians, almost 33% of reef-forming corals and sharks, over 20% of mammals and up to 10% of insects all at risk.*

For mammals alone, it will take millions of years to recover from the losses they are predicted to endure over the next half-century.

That future is hard to imagine, but we can see what’s happening right now.

The human population has more than doubled since the 1970s, adding over four billion people in half a century – or roughly, one country of Congo every year. 40% of them live within 100km of the coast.

*In 2014, only 3% of the ocean was free from human pressure and 66% of it has been severely altered by human activities.*

*Surface waters are 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution*.

*Healthy coral reefs have shrunk by nearly half*.

*Coastal mangrove forests and seagrass meadows that guard shores from flooding and storms have been in the decline for decades.*

*About a third of ocean fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels, and nearly two-thirds are on the brink.*

*Since 1900, global average sea level has risen by at least 16 centimetres. 6 centimetres of that rise happened just in the past 20 years.*

Things are changing on land too:

*Cities have more than doubled in area since 1992. We’ll add 25 million kilometres of new road and cement in the next 30 years mainly in developing countries.*

*As countries get richer, their resource use accelerates. We extract 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources from the planet every year – twice as much as in 1980.*

*More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly three-quarters of our freshwater are now devoted to crops or livestock.*

As diverse as human populations have become, our food is becoming less so. Around 75 per cent of what we eat comes from just twelve plants and five animal sources.

*Wheat, maize, and rice make up nearly 60% of the plant-based calories in most diets.*

More than 550 breeds of mammals use for food and agriculture throughout history have already gone extinct.

*Pollinator losses put up to 577 billion dollars in annual global crops at risk.*

*Today, 25% of the world’s ice-free land is used for grazing, and half of the agricultural expansion has come at the expense of forests.*

*Between 1990 and 2015, nearly 3 million square kilometres of native forest was cut down, and only 68% of the world’s forest area remains from pre-industrial times.*

These land changes altogether have left half a million terrestrial species without enough habitat to survive long term.

As trade and travel expand, we’re moving plants and animals around too. Some countries are seeing as much as 70% more invasive species than in 1970.

*Because we unwittingly spread just one fungus around the world – Chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatids – nearly 400 species of amphibians are now threatened, and 90 have gone extinct.*

No known disease has damaged global biodiversity more.

We’ve also spread our garbage around the world.

*Marine plastic has increased 10 times since 1980 and three to four hundred million tonnes of toxic waste is dumped into the world’s waters every year.*

*Fertilizers washing into the coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, where there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain most life.*

Along with fertilizers, land clearing and crop production account for a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions have doubled since the 1980s, rising average global temperatures by at least +0.7°C which doesn’t sound like much, but at just 2°C of warming, 1 in 20 extinctions will be directly caused by climate change.

Plants and plankton sequester 5.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ every year. That’s 60 per cent of global fossil fuel emissions, removed by species we currently threaten.

The long list of plants and animals that disappeared 56 million years ago during the PETM owe their demise almost solely to carbon and climate change, but the threats today to natural ecosystems go far beyond climate. Diseases, land use, and pollution also threaten our planet’s plants and animals.

We’re animals too, and our actions have already affected our own future. Yet, if this were to all disappear, if one million species were to go extinct and we were to change our planet to this extent, in the scale of geologic time, should we look back on this moment, the billions of us would be a paper-thin memory in the long history of Earth. It’s up to us to decide if the world we know today gets to be more than that in the future.

Wow, guys. Wow. Am I right? Most of what you just read comes from the biggest review of life in Earth that’s ever been conducted. Over 400 experts from 50 countries looked up at 15,000 sources to give us this big pile of bad news. But they also provided plenty of opportunities to make it better. If you want to know more of what you can do to help the natural world, check the links below:

IPBES Biodiversity Global Assessment Report: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yd8l2v0u4jqptp3/AAACtf6ctsoUQ9hlPQxLpVsKa?dl=0

Information on the IPBES Biodiversity Report: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

IPBES Summary for Policymakers: https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_unedited_advance_for_posting_htn.pdf