By Narelle McCarthy
If you were an orang-utan you wouldn’t be happy at your prospects
Act now, act quickly and even act radically or else we will see the collapse of the planet’s natural systems that support our economies, lives and livelihoods.
That’ s the urgent warning from top level environmental scientists and some governments who provided material for a sobering report recently produced by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity.
While the report carries the dusty deadpan title ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3)’ and at first glance might excite academics, the reading behind the front cover is dynamite.
The convention’s headline message was: ‘New vision is required to stave off dramatic biodiversity loss’.
The report continued to say that these vital global natural systems were at risk of rapid degradation and collapse, unless there was also creative action to conserve and sustainably use the variety of life on Earth.
That was the principal conclusion of this major new assessment of the current state of biodiversity and the implications of its continued loss for human well-being.
There was also another red alert as the report confirmed that the world had failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.
If you were a koala or an orang-utan, or a glossy black cockatoo – just to name a very few of countless life forms that struggle to survive on this planet — you wouldn’t be happy at your prospects. You wouldn’t be happy with many who belong to the human species. Would they all hear your calls for help?
From Australia’s perspective in this in this Year of Biodiversity, Professor Roger Kitching, from Griffith School of the Environment, considers the greatest threats to biodiversity.
“In Australia three pervasive inter-related threats promise to wipe out great chunks of the very special biodiversity with which this once-isolated continent is endowed: land clearing, invasive species and climate change,” he said.
“Mixed up with these three are drivers such as inappropriate fire regimes, pervasive agricultural chemicals and lack of connectivity across the landscape.”
The UN report was also based on a study on future scenarios for biodiversity. Some of them make grim reading.
The report has been subject to an extensive independent scientific review process and its publication seen as one of the principal milestones of the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity.
In September it will be put before top world leaders and heads of state at a special meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. But the crunch talks will come in October at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in Japan, when their conclusions will be central to negotiations by world governments.
The executive secretary of the convention, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said:”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be 1000 times higher than the historical background rate. It should serve as wake-up call for humanity – business as usual is no longer an option.”
The Outlook contains the sobering facts and figures while identifying key reasons as to why the challenge of conserving and, indeed, enhancing biodiversity remains unmet.
One key area is economics. Many economies continue to ignore the significant value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems from forests and freshwaters to soils, oceans and the atmosphere.
And yet, significant reports and data stressing the economic imperatives and opportunities of restoring, preserving and enhancing biodiversity are being shunned in favour of the selfish and dangerous business-as-usual approach at the root of the catastrophes we now face.
A major international initiative called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has also presented a study to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity; to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. It draws together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward.
And the Outlook warns that the principal pressures leading to biodiversity loss are not just constant but are, in some cases, intensifying.
The critical analysis of the failure of countries to meet the 2010 biodiversity target will underpin the forthcoming conference of participating countries, including Australia, in Japan.
Most parties have confirmed that five main pressures continue to affect biodiversity within their borders: habitat loss, the unsustainable use and over-exploitation of resources, climate change, invasive alien species, and pollution.
The report sums up with yet another dire warning: “The consequences of this collective failure, if it is not quickly corrected, will be severe for us all. Biodiversity underpins the functioning of the ecosystems on which we depend for food and fresh water, health and recreation, and protection from natural disasters. Its loss also affects us culturally and spiritually. This may be more difficult to quantify, but is nonetheless integral to our well-being.”
Professional biologists and an increasingly informed community are in little doubt that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past.
As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth was currently losing something in the order of 30,000 species per year – which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour.
Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this ‘Sixth Extinction’ caused by ourselves, Homo sapiens – is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has long been ringing warning bells.
In 2004 they calculated the rate of extinction had reached 100 to 1000 times than that suggested by the fossil records before humans. The IUCN also has grounded reason to believe one in five mammals, one in three amphibians and one in seven birds are extinct or globally threatened, and other species groups still being assessed are showing similar patterns.
Simon Stuart, a senior IUCN scientist, has warned that: “For the first time since the dinosaurs, humans are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than new species can evolve.”
According to the IUCN, never has the world faced a more pressing crisis than the current loss of biodiversity which affects all of humanity. The gap between the pressure on our natural resources and governments’ response to the deterioration is widening.
As a sign of elevating this crisis in the context of other perceived global crises, the IUCN is calling for governments to come up with a ‘bail-out plan’, a 10-year strategy that will help countries halt and reverse this loss.
“Twenty-one per cent of all known mammals, 30 per cent of all known amphibians,12 per cent of all known birds, 35 per cent of conifers and cycads, 17 per cent of sharks and 27 per cent of reef-building corals assessed for the ‘IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’ are threatened with extinction,” says IUCN deputy director general, Bill Jackson.
“If the world made equivalent losses in share prices there would be a rapid response and widespread panic, as we saw during the recent economic crisis,” he said.
“The loss of biodiversity, crucial to life on earth, has, in comparison, produced little response. By ignoring the urgent need for action we stand to pay a much higher price in the long term than the world can afford.”
Jane Smart, director of the IUCN Biodiversity Conservation Group, continues: “Countries are taking a very short-sighted view of the need to fuel their economies at the expense of nature, so much so that we’re now at crisis point when it comes to the loss of biodiversity.
“We can’t afford to forget that all economic activity is linked to nature. We need new targets and a concerted effort to ensure our natural assets are protected.
“This year we have a one-off opportunity to really bring home to the world the importance of the need to save nature for all life on earth. If we don’t come up with a new big plan now, the planet will not survive.”
Another telling statistic of Australia’s poor environmental stewardship is that close to half all mammal extinctions worldwide in the last 200 years have occurred here.
With headlines across the world and mounting reports giving the dire warnings of a global biodiversity crisis and its repercussions impossible to ignore, are they being heeded? Alarmingly, not as urgently as warranted and not with the commensurate action such a crisis demands.
So what connection does the Sunshine Coast have to the ‘sixth extinction’ and this critical loss of biodiversity?
The region is recognised as a biodiversity ‘hotspot’ boasting the second greatest biodiversity outside of the wet tropics in Queensland.
And yet, it is slated to be home for at least 500,000 people in the next decade compounded by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year bringing incredible pressure on the environmental and liveability values of the region.
How will this unique biodiversity be protected, with its coastal lowlands and forests, waterways and the internationally listed Pumicestone Passage already approaching tipping points?
This region is set to be a contributor to the shocking statistics of biodiversity loss, extinctions and declining well-being unless protection from the recognised threats of overpopulation and clearly unsustainable practices are arrested.
Ecological integrity and respect for this amazing planet, of which we know so little is paramount.
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