The scientific community’s latest desperate plea for policy action has concluded that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.”

In the decades ahead, human activity might bring about the extinction of tens of thousands of animal and marine species, which would threaten human life as well, states the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The group’s new report focuses on nature’s losses over the past 50 years and says the scale and rapidity of the decline are shocking. The United Nations-backed “global assessment” is the work of more than 500 scientists from 50 countries around the world.

This is nothing less than Earth “being driven towards a ‘mass extinction event’ – only the sixth in the last half-billion years,” reports the BBC.

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing,” said German research ecologist Josef Settele in a IPBES statement. “The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

It is believed that around 40 percent of amphibians, 25 percent of mammals, 34 percent of conifers, 14 percent of birds and 31 percent of sharks and rays are “threatened with extinction.”

In the IPBES’ “summary for policymakers,” released last week ahead of publication of its global assessment report, the authors list five human-driven “culprits” for Earth’s decline: “changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of organisms; climate change; pollution; and invasive alien species.”

IPBES chairman Sir Robert Watson, a noted chemist and former senior scientific adviser for the World Bank, said the “overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture. The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

Watson said the situation is dire, but that it’s “not too late to make a difference. But only if we start now at every level from local to global.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.