Iconic British broadcaster and environmentalist Sir David Attenborough has warned world financial leaders overconsumption of the world’s natural resources is unsustainably cutting into its ecological “capital”.

“Financial systems have a lot in common with natural world systems. Both are economies,” Sir David said during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

“If you deal with your investment it’s fine if you can take the profit, you take the investment, but you wouldn’t be so silly as to eat into the capital, but that is what we’re doing with the natural world all the time,” the French newsagency AFP reports him as saying.

The BAFTA winner and long-time presenter of BBC wildlife documentaries spoke with IMF chief Christine Lagarde.

Europe can expect even greater migratory pressure from Africa unless action is taken to prevent global warming, Sir David also said in a strongly worded warning to policymakers that time is running out to save the natural world from extinction.

Speaking at the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund in the United States city of Washington DC, he said that on current trends parts of the world would soon become uninhabitable and populations would be be forced to move.

Sir David, 92, said it was vital that countries met their commitments made in the 2015 United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions because time was fast running out for the planet.

Asked by the IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, whether there was a link between migration and climate change, Sir David said: “It is happening in Europe.

“People are coming from Africa because they can’t live where they are.”

AFP reports he said human beings and their domesticated animals now accounted for 96 per cent of the global mass of all mammals.

“We’ve eliminated the rest,” he said.

“Seventy per cent of all bird species have gone. We are in terrible, terrible trouble.”

“I find it difficult to exaggerate the peril that we are in. We are in the process of a new fresh extinction which we know all about from geological time,” said Sir David.

“This is the new extinction , and we’re halfway through it.”

Early colonists in North America did not understand how their consumption of one species affected populations of others, he added.

He pointed to the hunting of sea otters for their fur, which increased populations of sea urchins that had been preyed upon by the otters.

The urchins then consumed more kelp, reducing spawning grounds for fish, which had previously been a great source of wealth, said Sir David.

“When you remove the kelp forests the fish could no longer survive,” said Sir David.

“When you did realise it you could deal with it but it requires understanding.”

He also warned the time had long since come to deal with climate change.

“The rate at which the climate is changing and warming, unless we act on the Paris Agreement to restrict that, we’re going to be in real trouble,” he said.

“Otherwise, if we just go on thinking this is going to be fine, we are going to be heading for major catastrophes. No doubt about that.”

Sir David said the planet was experiencing a ‘fresh extinction’ that called for concerted action.

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