The richness of life on Earth will be decimated, with more than a million species at risk of going extinct, unless radical action is taken to reverse an acute, accelerating and entirely human-caused biodiversity crisis, according to a landmark global assessment released Monday.

Ending the annihilation is possible, the authors of the report say. But only by overhauling the global economic system, along with most other political and social institutions.

“We’ve applied Band-Aids to all sorts of wounds. But we haven’t addressed the knife,” says Kai Chan, a co-ordinating lead author of the assessment and a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.

“The message is one of hope, because we are good at solving problems when we understand them. And I would argue now we actually understand this problem.”

The report, issued by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), is a vastly comprehensive appraisal of the health of plant and animal life on this planet. One hundred and forty-five authors from 50 countries spent three years examining more than 15,000 sources of evidence. A summary was approved for release at a meeting in Paris on Saturday.

Human actions have driven at least 680 vertebrate species to extinction since 1500 — from the golden toad, a diaphanous jewel of the Costa Rican cloud forest that succumbed to human-spread fungus and drying habitat, to Schomburgk’s deer, hunted for its spectacular antlers and displaced by rice fields in Thailand’s swampy central plain.

Read more:

Opinion | Global biodiversity crisis demands conservation action that is both effective and equitable

Opinion | To save nature, world leaders should look to Canada’s leadership

Editorial | Canada must protect its biodiversity

The authors found that the pace of extinctions has rocketed so sharply above the normal “background” rate — it is currently tens to hundreds of times above the average of the last 10 million years — that up to a million species could be eliminated from the planet, some within mere decades. Earth hosts eight million species.

Some wildlife is faring worse than others. The average proportion of species at risk of extinction in each plant and animal group the authors studied is about 25 per cent. But more than a third of marine mammals are facing annihilation, almost a third of reef-forming corals, almost a third of sharks and their relatives, and more than 40 per cent of amphibians. (The rate for insects is a key uncertainty: it is estimated at 10 per cent, but they are harder to assess and make up 75 per cent of Earth’s total species.)

The biodiversity crisis is intrinsically bad for nature. But it’s bad for us, too, since nature provides so many benefits to humans, sometimes known as “ecosystem services.”

The report notes that three-quarters of food crop types, including fruits and vegetables as well as coffee, cocoa and almonds, rely on pollinators like bumblebees and honeybees, meaning hundreds of billions of dollars in crop yields are vulnerable.

Coral reefs that buffered floods are disappearing. Oceans and forests that sequester carbon, dampening the effects of climate change, are being degraded.

And then there are the cultural, spiritual and quality-of-life benefits we derive from nature. The report notes that these benefits are intangible and hard to measure. But in this country, polling has shown that Canadians broadly support the protection of nature — and their top reason is to protect wildlife and natural beauty, above any ways they plan to enjoy or use those places.

Gains and losses, the authors note, are not distributed evenly. Richer people are more likely to draw from the Earth’s bounty, while the destruction of ecosystem services is more likely to be borne by the poor and vulnerable. Indigenous people are also disproportionately affected, says the report, because of their strong ties to the land — the losses interfering with not only their livelihoods and cultures but also their ability to protect biodiversity for the benefit of all.

In a rare positive finding, the authors note that lands and waters managed by Indigenous people are often healthier than other areas — even some formally protected areas, like national parks. Research conducted in Canada suggests that is the case, too. At least a quarter of the globe is owned, managed, used or occupied by Indigenous peoples.

But Indigenous territory is under pressure too, the authors warn, from resource extraction, mining, energy infrastructure and more.

Valérie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, highlighted a sobering finding from the report: 85 per cent of the world’s wetlands have been wiped out. But a quarter of what’s left sits in Canada’s boreal forests, she notes, much of it on Indigenous land, including First Nations that have some of the worst socioeconomic conditions in the country.

“It’s really thanks to the wise management of the relationship between land and Indigenous people that those areas still exist. There is a desire generally by Indigenous people to recognize the contributions of nature to our survival, and to conserve that.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The authors explicitly call on policy-makers to recognize and respect Indigenous institutions, values, innovations, practices and knowledge, and to engage with and consider Indigenous communities, something they note is currently sorely lacking.

Courtois agrees, calling this directive both a responsibility and an opportunity.

“My people, the Innu, survived in the Arctic for 10,000 years by being in balance with nature. Surely we have something to offer.”

What is compelling the catalogue of destruction? The assessment found that globally, changes in land and sea use, especially agriculture, are the No. 1 driver, and direct exploitation of organisms, like fishing and logging, is the next. Pollution and invasive species are also causing significant harm.

But climate change, which exacerbates these stressors everywhere, is especially consequential in high latitudes like Canada. In polar, subpolar and boreal regions — eco-zones that make up the majority of Canada — the biodiversity within oceans and on land are projected to decline “mostly” because of global warming and its related effects, such as sea-ice loss.

Canada is warming at twice the global rate. Many species are unable to cope. The authors say the continued existence of species threatened by climate change will depend on their ability to move to new, suitable environmental pockets as they chase conditions they require to thrive. Often, but not always, those pockets are to the north.

It is not too late to halt the biodiversity catastrophe, the report highlights. Nature needs to be set aside and protected. Canada is a signatory to the Convention of Biodiversity, which laid out a series of goals known as Aichi targets, including protecting 17 per cent of terrestrial lands and 10 per cent of oceans by 2020. Canada lags far behind other Group of 7 countries, though the Liberal government has hurried to catch up in recent years and created a $1.3-billion “Nature Fund” in the last federal budget.

Courtois called the investment a “good start,” and noted that a recent call for proposals under the Nature Fund was swamped with pitches for Indigenous-led conservation.

The IPBES global assessment, warning that the Aichi targets likely won’t be achieved, is also sure to provide a foundation for much more ambitious targets — 30 per cent or more — when the parties meet again in China next year.

“Some of Canada’s least-protected areas are the most important for at-risk species, and the most important for carbon storage,” says Emily Giles, senior specialist for species conservation at WWF-Canada.

“This report shows that we are not on track to a sustainable future. But we can be, if we demand from our governments and policy-makers big transformative change.”

Chan, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s “Pathways Towards a Sustainable Future” chapter, said that individuals are already doing the most they can — the scale of change now requires us to pressure political systems and other institutions to overhaul national and global economies.

“Nature isn’t broken. But you could say that our institutions are not fit for purpose,” says Chan.

“Really what we need to do is fix them.”

Read more about: