These are questions I had been pondering in reporting the story. Climate change has become a major environmental issue, garnering quite a lot of media attention. But the decline in the diversity of plant and animal life around the world tends to get considerably less coverage, even though it is a major issue in its own right.

One possible reason for the disparity is that the effects of global warming are more apparent to many people. Record-breaking heat waves, deadly wildfires, rising sea levels — those are all tangible things that we can see fairly easily. But it is harder to notice if there are, say, fewer insects around than there were 30 years ago. And it is even harder to explain what that might mean for most people’s daily lives.

“People don’t see that species are vanishing, because many of those species are not visible,” said Dirk S. Schmeller, a research professor at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse in France. And the variety of ways that biodiversity loss can affect people, he said, “is so complex that people can have difficulties in grasping the links.”

So, as if mindful of that conundrum, the scientists and experts who wrote the report spent a lot of effort trying to frame biodiversity loss as an urgent issue for human well-being.

Natural ecosystems, they explained in extensive detail, provide invaluable material services to people, from mangrove forests that protect millions from coastal flooding to wetlands that help purify our drinking water to insects that pollinate our fruits and vegetables. The loss of wild plant varieties could make it harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops to cope with threats like increased heat and drought.