By AFP - Agence France Presse
The Earth's biodiversity crisis in numbers
By Benjamin Legendre
Cali, Colombia - The experts' assessment is clear: human beings are the greatest threat to the Earth.
The experts' assessment is clear: human beings are the greatest threat to the land, the seas, and all the living beings they harbor, including ourselves.
The COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, enters its second week on Monday to assess and accelerate progress towards meeting the 23 targets agreed in Canada two years ago to halt and reverse the destruction of nature by 2030.
Science in numbers:
2/3 of the oceans degraded
Three-quarters of the Earth's surface has already been significantly altered, and two-thirds of the oceans have been degraded by humanity's voracious consumption, according to the intergovernmental science and policy body on biodiversity IPBES.
Globally, more than a third of inland wetlands declined from 1970 to 2015 - a rate three times greater than the loss of forests.
“Land degradation through human activities is harming the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people,” according to the latest IPBES report.
But he points out that all is not lost, and the benefits of restoration would be 10 times greater than the costs.
One of the 23 targets of the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is for 30% of degraded land, inland water, and marine and coastal ecosystems to be under “effective restoration” by 2030.
One million threatened species.
More than a quarter of the plants and animals on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of threatened species are at risk of extinction.
According to IPBES, around one million species are at risk.
Pollinators, essential for the reproduction of plants and three-quarters of the crops that feed humanity, are on the front line, dying out rapidly.
Corals - on which some 850 million people depend for food and work - are another striking example.
These animals, whose reefs provide food and spawning grounds for a multitude of creatures, could practically disappear in a world 2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels.
This is the maximum limit of average global warming that the world is trying not to exceed according to the 2015 Paris Agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gases that heat the Earth.
'Five horsemen of the apocalypse'
For the UN, the biodiversity crisis has five causes, all human-induced and dubbed the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
They are habitat destruction (for agriculture or human infrastructure), overexploitation of resources such as water, climate change, pollution, and the spread of invasive species.
Climate change is likely to become the main factor in the destruction of biodiversity by 2050, according to experts.
Half of GDP
More than half (55%) of the world's gross domestic product, around $58 trillion, depends “heavily or moderately” on nature and its services, according to auditing giant PwC.
Agriculture, forestry, fishing and aquaculture, the food and beverage sector, and construction are the sectors most exposed to the loss of nature.
Pollination services, drinking water, and disease control are other almost incalculable benefits derived from nature.
Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev, who led a research project entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), estimated that the loss of biodiversity has a cost of 1.35 trillion euros to 3.1 trillion euros (US$ 1.75 trillion to US$ 4 trillion) per year.
US$ 2.6 billion in subsidies
In September, a report by the monitor Earth Track stated that environmentally damaging subsidies to industries were worth at least $2.6 trillion, equivalent to 2.5% of global GDP.
This exceeds the Kunming-Montreal framework's target of mobilizing $200 billion a year by 2030 for nature protection.
Harmful sectors that benefit from subsidies include fishing, agriculture, and fossil fuel producers.
Another goal of the biodiversity framework is to reduce harmful subsidies and tax breaks by “at least $500 billion a year” by 2030.
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