Loading The clunkily named Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment estimated a million plants and animals "already face extinction, many within decades" unless action is taken to reduce pressures from land clearing to pollution and climate change. Organisers hope the findings, drawn from some 15,000 research and government sources, will form the basis of a "Paris Agreement for nature" when nations send delegates next year to a follow-up conference in China. The need for a coordinated effort much like the Paris climate pact to halt the accelerating extinction rate - some 100 times faster than the natural pace over the past 10 million years - makes sense. Apart from the cross-border aspect of many challenges, climate change itself is exacerbating the threats for many species, from heat stress to acidifying oceans, the IPBES report found.

'Brutal environment' Extreme weather doesn't make it any easier for farmers in Australia either. In addition to the well-publicised drought that has hammered south-eastern states, a delayed and weak monsoon produced the Northern Territory's fourth lowest summer rainfall, the Bureau of Meteorology says. Northern Australia as a whole had its hottest summer on record - as did the country - with maximum temperatures two degrees above the 1961-90 average. “We live in a brutal environment," Lanzarin says. "You go from feast to famine.”

The Coodardie's response has been to employ farming techniques developed by the Kachana Station in the Kimberley. With no surface water on their paddocks, the farmers shift troughs around to create short-term "pulses" of cattle grazing. “We don’t put the water troughs in the same area twice, so you don’t have the compaction of soil issues and weed problems that occur when you have real intensification around a water point for any length of time," Lanzarin says. The approach - which helps maintain ground cover whether from trees or more grass varieties - has drawn praise from scientists such as Tim Flannery, a palaeontologist at the Australian Museum and the Climate Council. "These plants are adapted to grazing from large mammals," Flannery says. Cattle farming done well "can be a force for good", he says, adding the caveat, "of course, 95 per cent are not like that".

Unsustainable ways Indeed, unsustainable agricultural and fishery practices are among the drivers of the rising extinction rate. "Over one-third of the world’s land surface and nearly three-quarters of available freshwater resources are devoted to crop or livestock production," the IPBES report found. Crop production occurs on some 12 per cent and grazing on about 25 per cent. Forest cleared for an oil palm plantation inside the Leuser Ecosystem in Indonesia's Aceh province in 2014. Credit:Michael Bachelard The tropics, home to much of the world's biodiversity, have been particularly hard hit, with 100 million hectares of forest lost from 1980 to 2000 alone. Cattle ranching in Latin America contributed some 42 per cent of that, while oil-palm plantations led to much of the loss of 7.5 million hectares of south-east Asian forests, the report found.

And the use of chemicals to restrain species deemed by farmers to be weeds or pests are having impacts on biodiversity that we are only beginning to grasp. Loading Dung mountains Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, an ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, includes Australian examples in her recent book Extraordinary Insects to demonstrate the important but largely ignored roles they play in supporting the ecosystems we depend on. For instance, she notes it how Australia's native beetles had been reared on dry, hard marsupial dung for millions of years "and certainly have very little taste for the foreign cuisine" of the mushy manure of exotic cattle.

As a result, cattle dung was blotting out up to 2000 square kilometres of grazing land per year at its peak. Apart from the problematic greenhouse gas potency of methane produced by the animals, each cow is capable of dumping 9 tonnes of dung - enough to cover five tennis courts - annually, she writes. In the end, it took local entomologists 15 years - and ultimately 43 different dung beetle species - to find species that could dispose of the problem - and the "plague of flies" that went with it. The IPBES report, if anything, underplays the threat to species because science actually knows so little about the species we are wiping out. The assessment, for instance, states only a "tentative estimate" that one in 10 insect species is threatened with extinction. "We only know about one million of the maybe 5.5 million insects species that we think live on the planet," Sverdrup-Thygeson says. "So yes, [the proportion at risk] could be higher."

She implores people pay insects more heed, noting that there are about 200 million of them per human. If you're a bigger fan of birds, you'll be happy to know insects provide 500 million tonnes of food annually to keep our feathered friends alive. A Lord Howe island stick insect - brought back from the brink of extinction after a surviving population was located on a rocky outcrop 20 kilometres away. Credit:Joe Armao Chocolate at risk Sverdrup-Thygeson rolls off multiple reasons to avoid the human instinct to spray or stamp on creepy crawlers or other bugs. "Insect visits to flowers contribute to seed production in more than 80 per cent of the world’s wild plants." she says. "Insect pollination also improves fruit or seed quality or quantity in a large proportion of our global food crops." "Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not be pollinated," the Norwegian scientists adds. "No cocoa, no chocolate."

Then there's its "thoroughly crucial task" of decomposing dead organic matter that turns dead plants and animals into soil. A cocoa plantation near Anapu, in the northern Amazon state of Para, Brazil. Credit:AP Dieter Hochuli, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney, agrees that insects are among the species at risk whose full value to our ecosystems is partially understood. “There’s only a tiny, tiny proportion of the animals and plants on the planet that have actually been studied - evenly moderately studied," he says. Francisco Sanchez-Bayo, a Sydney University colleague, earlier this year estimated a third of all insect species were threatened in the countries where such trends had been studied. Knowing how quickly such species are declining is made tougher since many species are unknown to science, with perhaps only one-third of Australian insect species identified so far, he said.

More of the same Hochuli says predicting which species are at risk is difficult because as population numbers shrink, the lack of genetic variety meant a species could be just one traumatic event - such as a heatwave or pollution spill - from oblivion. The IPBES report identified the increased sameness within species as a key risk - including for plants and animals that humans rely on for food and fibre. "These wild relatives represent critical reservoirs of genes and traits that may provide resilience against future climate change, pests and pathogens, and may improve current heavily depleted gene pools of many crops and domestic animals," it said. Human behaviour, such as the overuse of antibiotics, is also likely to increase the threat from bacterial pathogens and other infectious diseases by encouraging rapid evolution of antibiotic resistance, it said. While scientific interventions could help save "charismatic" species such as Tasmanian Devils - where injections of cancer cells can stimulate immunity to deadly facial tumours - it is impractical to assume many at-risk creatures can be saved, Hochuli says.

And since many species are in so-called "obligate relationships" (that is, they can't survive without each other) the disappearance of one can mean "losing two or three for the price of one", he says. For instance, the spectacled flying fox plays a key role in pollinating and seeding the country's tropical rainforests, says James Trezise, a policy analyst with the Australian Conservation Foundation. Populations of the flying fox - now listed nationally as endangered - plunged about 90 per cent between 1995 and 2000 to just 80,000 animals, he says. The known threats include pesticide residue poisoning, illegal shooting and electrocution on power lines. A rescued orphaned grey-headed flying fox feeds on eucalyptus pollen; the animal is listed as vulnerable. Credit:Doug Gimesy / Alamy Reduced to about 60,000 by last year, about one-third of the remaining flying foxes were wiped out in a single extreme heatwave, the ABC reported in December.

"The most important place to start is protecting what we still have, especially places that are critical habitats for threatened species and intact ecosystems," Trezise says. "We definitely need stronger laws that actually protect these critical areas." 'Same level as the climate crisis' Loading The latest reports are hardly encouraging if the 10th triennial NSW State of the Environment Report, released on Thursday, is any guide. It reported a sharp jump in approvals to clear native vegetation to 2014-15 - but omitted later data that will, when eventually released, likely show an even faster acceleration as state laws have been weakened since.