It’s not too late...

IT’S tough being an optimist these days.

With the notable exception of the recent royal baby announcement, any news that isn’t the soul vacuum that is Brexit somehow manages to be even more depressing: hurricanes, floods, plane crashes, stabbings – and now a report telling us that we are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.

Those not-very-cheery words came from Sir Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – a name so long they have to abbreviate the abbreviation to IPBES.

The report, which took more than 450 contributors spanning 50 countries, 15,000 scientific papers and many different fields of knowledge a good three years to compile, doesn’t paint the rosiest picture of the world into which we welcome Harry and Meghan’s new arrival.

Around one million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction – many within decades. These include mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, trees, flowers, fish and corals.

That’s a pretty sobering prospect, but the news gets worse: not only are species of all kinds disappearing, but they’re doing so at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years.

The roll-call of doom includes more than 40% of amphibian species and more than a third of marine mammals threatened with extinction, with an average of 25% of all terrestrial, freshwater and marine vertebrate, invertebrate and plant groups that have been studied in enough detail facing the same fate.

Oh – and it’s all our fault. Humans have only been around for about 200,000 years, yet according to the Living Planet Report published earlier this year, the average size of species population decline across the board has been 60% since 1970… in the grand scheme of things that’s pretty quick work!

There’s no doubt this is an unprecedented ecological crisis – but can understanding the causes help us do anything about it?

The IPBES report identifies five main factors.

Most significant of all are changes in land and sea use. Basically, modern humans aren’t great roommates: when we move in, we don’t tend to leave much room for nature. Some 66% of marine environments have been ‘severely altered’ by human actions. More than a third of the world’s land surface and 75% of freshwater resources are currently used for crops or livestock. We destroyed 50 million hectares of tropical forest in just 20 years, mainly to make room for cattle farming in Latin America and palm oil plantations in South East Asia.

And to add insult to injury, agriculture that is potentially harmful to the environment receives at least $100bn annually in financial support.

The second biggest culprit is what the report calls ‘direct exploitation of organisms’ – in other words, the things we hunt and poach. A third of marine fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels, for example.

Third in terms of impact to date is climate change – although those impacts are expected to increase in future and in some cases overtake other drivers, unless greenhouse gas emissions are significantly reduced. Climate change affects biodiversity in myriad ways and at every level, from genetics through to ecosystems. Everyone understands how it affects animals like polar bears, but there are less obvious effects too… Warmer oceans can’t hold as much oxygen, for example, meaning they simply can’t sustain as much life.

Taking fourth place is pollution. The sheer scale of the plastic pollution problem globally is sadly something we’re quite familiar with now, but we’re probably less aware of the 300-400 million tonnes of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other forms of industrial waste that are dumped into water systems every year, or the hundreds of hypoxic marine ‘dead zones’ caused by fertiliser run-off, affecting a cumulative area bigger than the UK.

Fifth we have invasive alien species – generally from a different region, landmass or continent, as opposed to outer space. Our globetrotting habits have (either accidentally or deliberately) introduced non-native species into areas where they have no natural predators and therefore proliferate in and dominate their new environment.

This report paints a bleak big picture, and Guernsey is of course not immune from these depressing global trends. And yet, there is some hope.

Sir Robert Watson explains that ‘it is not too late to make a difference – but only if we start now at every level from local to global’.

Transformative change can be achieved through better agriculture, fishing and water management, for example.

Also, crucially, conservation efforts really do work. The extinction risk of birds, mammals and amphibians would have been at least 20% higher had it not been for the actions of individuals and organisations in the last 10 years.

And that’s what restores at least some of my optimism.

Guernsey’s biodiversity strategy delivers bang for its relatively tiny buck. As a community, we’re also lucky to have armies of volunteers who regularly turn up in all weathers to plant trees, clear sour fig, clean beaches and ponds, tag ormers, sow pollinators, and house birds and bugs and bees and all the other incredible acts of ecological kindness that take place across the island.

Our natural environment is an asset that we can – and should – invest so much more in, because the dividends are invaluable.

It’s a legacy I think is well worth protecting and enhancing for the benefit of the next generations.