The fall of biodiversity in a WWF's report

We must reverse the trend if we want to save biodiversity and we can do it only with a "global deal", a worldwide commitment that defends the richness of life on Earth. Wwf launched the appeal yesterday, publishing the Living Planet Report, an annual report produced with the help of more than fifty experts and in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, which since 1998 has provided a snapshot of the state of nature.

The report reminds that the variety of species must become a real investment. Many researches have showed the great importance of natural systems for our health, our well-being, our nutrition, our safety. Globally it has been estimated that nature offers services that can be valued at around $ 125 trillion, far far higher than the total gross domestic product of countries around the world, which is about $ 80 trillion.

From 1970 to 2014, vertebrate populations fell by 60%. The Living Planet Index is an indicator of the state of global biodiversity, elaborated by the WWF together with the Zoological Society of London, which signals the health status of the species of our planet. Published for the first time in 1998, for two decades it has recorded an abundance of 16,704 populations of over 4,000 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians (vertebrate animals) around the world. A trend that in less than 50 years has seen a dramatic decline, as confirmed by the Living Planet Report 2018.

The threats that are undermining the more than 8,500 endangered species on the Red List of the IUCN mainly concern over-exploitation and changes in natural environments, particularly those due to agriculture. The 75% of extinctions from 1500 to today have been caused by over-exploitation and agriculture.

Other threats come from climate change, which is becoming a growing driver, from pollution, from invasive species - which we have moved to many areas of the planet where they previously did not exist and compete with many native species - from dams and mines. 20% of the Amazonian forest area has disappeared in just 50 years, while marine environments have lost almost a third of corals in the last 30 years.

In the last 50 years our ecological footprint, the measure of consumption of natural resources, has increased by 190%. Creating a more sustainable system requires significant and urgent changes in production and consumption activities.

In March 2018, the Intergovernmental Science/Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published the Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment, which shows that today less than 25% of the Earth's surface is still in natural conditions and that carrying on with the current exploitation trends without reversing the current trend, the percentage of land area emerged under natural conditions will fall to 10% by 2050. Today, soil degradation undermines the welfare of around 3.2 billion people worldwide.

In the modern era - still explains the report - wetlands have lost 87% of their size. Land degradation also includes the loss of forests, a phenomenon that in the temperate zones has been slowed down by reforestation operations but has been accelerating in tropical forests. An analysis in 46 countries in the tropical and sub-tropical areas showed that large-scale commercial agriculture and subsistence agriculture accounted respectively for around 40% and 33% of the forest conversion between 2000 and 2010. 27% of deforestation was caused by urban growth, expansion of infrastructure and mining activities. This degradation has heavy impacts on the species, on the quality of the habitats and on the functioning of the ecosystems.

From now to 2020, the WWF recalls that we have a single window to create a positive relationship between humanity and nature. The Convention of Biological Diversity is identifying new goals and targets for the future. These, together with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), can become a massive protection of nature and biodiversity.

The WWF with its Living Planet Report 2018 tells how we need well-defined targets and a series of credible actions to restore natural systems in order to give prosperity and well-being to humanity. Eventually environmental policies - the environmental association insists - «must make a steering and draw a clear path for the post-2020 agenda» capable of identifying clear objectives to achieve the defense of biodiversity; develop the relevant indicators able to record the progress of reducing the loss of biodiversity and agree on a series of concrete actions that collectively achieve the objectives in the given timeframe».