A new UN report is set to reveal that up to 1m species face extinction because of human actions. The loss of pollinating insects and other ecological disasters – from the destruction of flood-saving mangroves to air pollution – poses no less of a threat than climate change, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

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We are triggering a mass extinction event, and critically we cannot separate one environmental crisis from another. Biodiversity loss cannot be partitioned from climate change, or from human population growth or pollution or plastics in our oceans. These challenges are all interconnected. We face an ecology of environmental concerns, and if we continue to consider these problems in partitioned isolation, solutions will continue to emerge far too slowly.

The IPBES report reveals that 3.2 billion people are suffering from degraded soils. We cannot feed our planet’s growing population by destroying its soil. And soil erosion is also fuelling climate change because that earth contains three times more carbon than is in the atmosphere. Soil-destroying chemical farming means there are no insects or skylarks above our fields – and so we’re experiencing this tragic loss of biodiversity.

The connections between these crises make solutions seem all too dauntingly difficult. But in fact, a solution to one problem will inevitably make a positive impact on many others too. More than 28,000 people are dying because of polluted air each year in Britain and air pollution is linked to psychotic experiences and a reduction in educational achievement. It’s not rocket science: improving air quality in our cities by cutting polluting vehicles will bring a vast range of benefits to human health, and help tackle climate change too. That’s a simple binary example of the ecology of crisis.

George Monbiot advocates taking land out of meat production and rewilding it. This will boost biodiversity enormously but will also tackle global warming because those rewilded, rewetted lands will capture significantly more carbon. If these lands are also opened up for us to enjoy, our physical and mental health will flourish. Thus we repair the ecology of destruction.

It can be difficult to know what we can do as individuals – but at least we all possess an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how farming, consumption and energy-use impacts upon the planet, hence the growth of the vegan movement. Lifestyle changes are always worth doing, but seldom as simple as they seem. As I found during Veganuary, it wasn’t too difficult to go vegan but that didn’t automatically mean I was eating ethically or in an environmentally friendly way: some of my vegan food was over-packaged and filled with palm oil.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The Extinction Rebellion protests made a difference to environmental debates in the House of Commons.’ Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

If I make a change, it’s me. If both of us do, it’s we. That’s how things grow. The youth climate strikes have been an incredible act of self-empowerment for that generation. I hope their confidence will grow and grow. At the moment they are campaigning about the climate; I hope that next they’ll be campaigning about how they can’t hear any birds singing.

And we’ve seen the success of Extinction Rebellion in recent weeks. These protests definitely made a difference to environmental debates in the House of Commons last week. As long as we keep it peaceful and democratic, activism is going to become increasingly important to not only instigate change, but to speed it up.

The human species is remarkably inventive and adaptable but it is simply no good at change. When we are presented with good evidence to change our minds, we resist it. For many farmers, change is coming, whether they accept it or not. Intensive livestock farming has been found out on many accounts. If I was a livestock farmer today and I wasn’t producing high-welfare, low-intensity, high-quality meat like Rosewood farm in Yorkshire or Henry Edmunds’ organic farm at Cholderton, Wiltshire, to name but two, I would be thinking, “OK, this vegan thing is growing quickly, I’d better diversify my business”. But many farmers are fighting these big social trends. Why fight these challenges, when they present a huge opportunity?

I’m not saying every farmer can follow Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree at Knepp, who have turned a failing farm into a rewilded, ecological haven with loads of biodiversity, but new ideas and models are out there. Like all of us, farmers need help to embrace change – and we need to change what farm subsidies do. We need government-supported low-interest loans to help farmers make these changes, to diversify and generate better opportunities for them, their families and their futures. Either big, intensive, chemically-fuelled farmers revise their businesses or the world is going to poison itself.

But we can’t just put the pressure on farmers, we need to act ourselves. So those of us who live in cities and suburbs should pressurise the government to introduce mandatory changes immediately to vastly improve urban biodiversity and air quality. My People’s Manifesto for Wildlife contains loads of practical ideas for positive regulations: why not have ponds on every industrial estate, and boxes for swifts and sparrows on every new housing development?

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We’re not struggling to find ideas to solve problems either globally or locally. It’s action we’re lacking, in government and beyond, as individuals and together as a species. If we act now we may be surprised at how these seemingly vast problems diminish quicker than we imagine.

• Chris Packham is a naturalist, nature photographer and author, and one of the presenters of BBC2’s Springwatch