There is a climate and ecological emergency, caused by humans – all of us but some much more than others – often without realising our impact. These problems are affecting our planet and our communities already, and are predicted to get much worse unless we rapidly take action. This page provides further detail on the ecological emergency, building on the shorter summary given by the Climate and ecological emergency page.
The ecological emergency is caused by a variety of pressures placed on the natural world by the collective action of humans. With an increasing population our impacts increase. Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating. The IPBES comprise a large group of leading scientists who in 2019 collectively demonstrated this in their 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, they do confirm that nature can be conserved and restored whilst meeting other human goals, if there is urgent and transformative change.
Human impacts on nature include (but are not limited to):
- degrading and fragmenting habitats leaving insufficient space for nature e.g. by building urban areas or through unsustainable farming practices.
- climate change, which changes the conditions in an area such that organisms are no longer adapted to live there.
- pollution, which can weaken or directly kill organisms.
- noise, which can make it more challenging for wildlife to communicate.
Our lifestyles contribute to all of these factors and in the modern globalised economy we have a significant impact elsewhere in the world in unexpected ways e.g. UK farmed chicken is often fed with Soya grown in the Brazilian Cerrado, an area of high biodiversity which is being deforested for such crop growing as reported by The Guardian.
We are fundamentally a part of the natural world and we depend on it’s ongoing health for our prosperity and ultimately for our survival. For free, nature provides us with the air that we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink and many of the materials we use. Supporting nature one of the most powerful ways to reduce global CO2 emissions. It helps reduce flood risk, gives us space for recreation, and also improves our health and wellbeing!
The IPBES 2019 report suggests that land/sea-use change is the biggest driver of the declines in nature, as shown in their summary diagram (see the size of the dark blue bars in the chart below relative to the other factors):
Therefore, it follows that, restoring natural habitats and giving nature back its home is the most powerful thing that we can do to stop the decline in nature.
We must urgently stop degrading the natural world and ensure the protection of remaining habitats and the restoration and enhancement of all areas so they work better for nature. This will involve considering how our lifestyles impact upon nature and reducing this impact, whilst supporting nature wherever possible. Every space offers an opportunity to support nature’s recovery; even an unloved patch in your garden, your balcony, or a road-side grass verge.
Our ecological footprint is measured in global hectares, and represents the land area needed to support our lifestyle, including the extraction of raw materials, processing, growing of food etc. A hectare is a square of 100m x 100m, slightly larger than a football/soccer pitch. In many rich and densely populated countries such as the UK, the land required to support the population’s ecological footprint is significantly larger than the country’s land area. Also, much of the land area used to support our lifestyle has been degraded from the natural ecosystem that was there before, and accommodates much less nature. Hence the population depends on resources from the land and causes ecosystem degradation both in their homeland and elsewhere. By reducing our ecological footprint we are reducing the human pressure on the natural world, allowing nature to flourish and support us; most importantly we are reducing the risk of widespread ongoing species extinctions and ecosystem collapse.
The diagram above also lists some powerful measures of the decline in nature: for instance, the global biomass of wild mammals has fallen by an estimated 82% since pre-history, which suggests a huge fall in the number of individuals of such species.
Also IPBES confirms that “the global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years and is accelerating.” See below diagram which illustrates the high extinction risk that many species currently face:
Some scientists suggest that we are now living through the early stages of earth’s 6th great mass extinction event. Mass extinctions are caused by significant changes to the earth’s natural systems which critically destabilise the ecosystem and erode its resilience. In the past these have been underpinned by long-term environmental changes (e.g. caused by changes in volcanic activity), but may also have had short-term triggers (e.g. a meteorite strike), with a combination of events changing the environment quicker than species can adapt and evolve to survive the changes. The previous 5 mass extinction events resulted in the loss of key species and wholesale changes to earth’s ecosystems, with the End-Permian event (250 million years ago) resulting in the extinction of 95% of all species alive at the time. Every part of the ecosystem is interlinked, with species having evolved to be inter-dependent on one another e.g. certain species of pollinator are critical to the reproduction of certain plants while the plant is a critical food-source of the pollinator. If the pollinator declines the plant will struggle to reproduce and this will then affect any other species that depend on the plant or pollinator, and such impacts can cascade through the food web. When ecosystems collapse, they do so in an unpredictable manner.
We are one species within the ecosystem, although over the last couple of million years we have risen to become the dominant species on the planet by many measures. Past dominant species have become extinct before, e.g. the dinosaurs during the End-Cretaceous mass extinction. We have greater ingenuity than past species, however, we remain reliant on many other species in the ecosystem, and so we ourselves are vulnerable to becoming extinct during a mass extinction event.
The greater the diversity of species and healthy habitats available, the more resilient the ecosystem will be, for instance:
- there are likely to be multiple arrangements of species interactions that can support the functioning of the ecosystem e.g. more pollinators to help the plant reproduce if one pollinator declines.
- a well functioning mature habitat shapes the earth systems around it, maintaining its own conditions e.g. the tropical rainforests create their own local wet climate, retaining moisture and influencing the weather systems. When they are cut down, a very different dry climate with lower diversity results.
Species and habitats can be lost extremely quickly to human pressure, within a few years – a small part of a human lifetime.
By contrast, mature habitats may take hundreds of years to develop while new species usually take tens of thousands to millions of years to evolve – many human lifetimes. Therefore if we lose critical species and habitats, we cannot expect to adequately replace them or their contributions to the ecosystem within human timescales.
Every species we lose is a part of our ecosystem that we will never get back. Until they are gone, we may never realise how important they were.
A Global Deal for Nature targets that by 2030, 30% of Earth should be formally protected and an additional 20% designated as climate stabilisation areas as a critical part of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
For information on the interlinked climate crisis, other linked crises and solutions at high level (for Governments) and grassroots level (for individuals) see the Climate and ecological emergency page.