The planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival because of ignorance and inaction, according to an international group of scientists, who warn people still haven’t grasped the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises.
The 17 experts, including Prof Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb, and scientists from Mexico, Australia and the US, say the planet is in a much worse state than most people — even scientists — understood.
“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms — including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” they write in a report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which references more than 150 studies detailing the world’s major environmental challenges.
Photo: AP
The delay between destruction of the natural world and the impacts of these actions means people do not recognize how vast the problem is, the paper argues. “[The] mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.”
The report warns that climate-induced mass migrations, more pandemics and conflicts over resources will be inevitable unless urgent action is taken.
“Ours is not a call to surrender — we aim to provide leaders with a realistic ‘cold shower’ of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future,” it adds.
Photo: AFP
Dealing with the enormity of the problem requires far-reaching changes to global capitalism, education and equality, the paper says. These include abolishing the idea of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing environmental externalities, stopping the use of fossil fuels, reining in corporate lobbying and empowering women, the researchers argue.
The report comes months after the world failed to meet a single UN Aichi biodiversity target, created to stem the destruction of the natural world, the second consecutive time governments have failed to meet their 10-year biodiversity goals. This week a coalition of more than 50 countries pledged to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030.
An estimated one million species are at risk of extinction, many within decades, according to a recent UN report.
Photo: Reuters
“Environmental deterioration is infinitely more threatening to civilization than Trumpism or COVID-19,” Ehrlich told the Guardian.
In The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Ehrlich warned of imminent population explosion and hundreds of millions of people starving to death. Although he has acknowledged some timings were wrong, he has said he stands by its fundamental message that population growth and high levels of consumption by wealthy nations is driving destruction.
He told the Guardian: “Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilization — it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals — not consuming more junk.”
Large populations and their continued growth drive soil degradation and biodiversity loss, the new paper warns. “More people means that more synthetic compounds and dangerous throwaway plastics are manufactured, many of which add to the growing toxification of the Earth. It also increases the chances of pandemics that fuel ever-more desperate hunts for scarce resources.”
The effects of the climate emergency are more evident than biodiversity loss, but still, society is failing to cut emissions, the paper argues. If people understood the magnitude of the crises, changes in politics and policies could match the gravity of the threat.
“Our main point is that once you realize the scale and imminence of the problem, it becomes clear that we need much more than individual actions like using less plastic, eating less meat or flying less. Our point is that we need big systematic changes and fast,” Professor Daniel Blumstein from the University of California Los Angeles, who helped write the paper, said.
The paper cites a number of key reports published in the past few years including:
— The World Economic Forum report in 2020, which named biodiversity loss as one of the top threats to the global economy.
— The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment report which said 70 percent of the planet had been altered by humans.
— The 2020 WWF Living Planet report, which warned the average population size of vertebrates had declined by 68 percent in the past five years.
A 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which said that humanity had already exceeded global warming of 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and is set to reach 1.5 degree Celsius warming between 2030 and 2052.
The report follows years of stark warnings about the state of the planet from the world’s leading scientists, including a statement by 11,000 scientists in 2019 that people will face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless major changes are made. In 2016, more than 150 of Australia’s climate scientists wrote an open letter to the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, demanding immediate action on reducing emissions. In the same year, 375 scientists — including 30 Nobel prize winners — wrote an open letter to the world about their frustrations over political inaction on climate change.
Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading, who was not involved in the report, said it was a frightening but credible summary of the grave threats society faces under a “business as usual” scenario. “Scientists now need to go beyond simply documenting environmental decline, and instead find the most effective ways to catalyze action,” he said.
Prof Rob Brooker, head of ecological sciences at the James Hutton Institute, who was not involved in the study, said it clearly emphasized the pressing nature of the challenges.
“We certainly should not be in any doubt about the huge scale of the challenges we are facing and the changes we will need to make to deal with them,” he said.
Aug 15 to Aug 21 Within hours, a minor traffic dispute between two taxi drivers had escalated into a full-out street brawl involving hundreds of combatants. Armed with metal bats, car locks and even tear gas, the midnight battle on Aug. 17, 1995 between Chuan Ming (全民) and Beiqu (北區) taxi drivers associations lasted for over four hours at the roundabout on Tingzhou Road (汀州路) in Taipei. Scattered clashes also broke out in other areas of the capital, as well as in what is today’s New Taipei City. The crowd dispersed around 4:30am, but peace lasted only a few hours. Around 7am, about
It’s baking hot in New York, which can only mean one thing for the city’s small mammal population: it’s splooting season. This week, with temperatures reaching 35 degrees Celsius, the city’s parks department urged residents not to worry about the health of squirrels seen sprawling on the ground, legs extended behind them like a person whose arms gave out halfway through a yoga class. “On hot days, squirrels keep cool by splooting (stretching out) on cool surfaces to reduce body heat,” the department tweeted. Perhaps even more remarkable than the phenomenon itself was the word the government agency used. Splooting? Is that
Demand for Taiwanese migrant workers in Singapore is booming: there are more than a thousand jobs on many Web sites, with advertisements for cabin crew, executive assistants, engineers, credit analysts, even auto mechanics, all at far more than they could earn in Taiwan. Most of us think of Taiwan as place that absorbs migrant workers, but we are also a place that is increasingly sending them out. This has important ramifications for the future of Taiwan. Last week, the government issued another one of its periodic warnings that certain overseas employers are actually enslaving Taiwanese into conducting Internet and phone scams,
When Zuo tested positive for COVID-19 while working as a cleaner in one of Shanghai’s largest quarantine centers, she hoped it wouldn’t be long before she could pick up the mop and start earning again. But four months on, she is still fighting to get her job back — one of scores of recovering COVID patients facing what labor rights activists and health experts say is a widespread form of discrimination in zero-COVID China. Using snap lockdowns and mass testing, China is the last major economy still pursuing the goal of stamping out the virus completely. Those who test positive, as well
RSS