As yet another Australian election campaign became mired in squabbling over the cost of cutting carbon emissions, conservation scientists were convening in Paris to drop a bombshell.
Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades — more than at any time in human history. The number is as brutal as it is mind-boggling — our planet faces the loss of more than 50 species per day, every day, for the next 50 years.
What’s in the report
A landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) paints an apocalyptic vision of a world not just battered and ravaged by ham-fisted human activity, but irrevocably ruined by land-clearing, overfishing and man-made climate change.
The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is the most comprehensive study of its kind ever completed. It is the meticulous and frightening culmination of three years’ work by 145 expert authors from 50 countries. Assessing 15,000 scientific and government sources over a 50-year period of change, it paints a series of ever more disturbing scenarios for the coming decades.
IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson, describes as “ominous” the unprecedented deterioration of the health of the planet’s ecosystems.“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” The extinction risk list includes more than 40% of amphibian species and one in every three marine mammals and reef-forming corals.
What it means for the election
The blithe irrelevance of the 2019 election campaign has been put into rather stark relief by the report, which illustrates the global scale of ecosystem damage inflicted not merely by climate change but by western-style agricultural practices, rampant overfishing and plastics use.
Climate change has been identified as the fastest growing threat, driven by rapid increases in human population and consumption and rapacious resource extraction. The report found degradation has been less severe or avoided entirely in areas held or managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities.
The Australian government’s tardiness in utilising the knowledge of First Peoples in its response to the recent catastrophic loss of fish life in the Murray-Darling Basin shows how little prepared we are to tap into the knowledge and sustainability practices of traditional custodians who have managed these natural “resources” for 60,000 years.
The impacts go far beyond nebulous concerns about biodiversity and habitat loss and directly to the economic future of the world. For developing countries, the multiple threats are existential: such countries lack the institutional, economic and financial resources to prevent serious damage to life and society. For developed countries like Australia, they represent serious economic impacts that will materially reduce the standard of living of Australians as agricultural industries struggle, areas become uninsurable, tourism industries suffer and maritime exports are halted by weather events.
Of six policy scenarios tested, only those that featured bold transformative change came close to stemming the downward spiral towards ecosystem collapse.
Dire as many of the scenarios it outlines may be, the report is not pure doomsday.
There is a blueprint of sorts for sustainability, provided urgent action is taken at the political and industrial level to transform sectors such as agriculture, forestry, energy and finance.
“The blithe irrelevance of the 2019 election campaign has been put into rather stark relief by the report”
Exactly this.
This will make no difference because the whole world is stuck in a fog of endless growth and greed driven capitalism. We must lower the world’s population or destroy the earth as we know it and that means capitalism must become extinct because it demands endless growth in a finite world which is impossible. Governments are in thrall to the polluters otherwise projects like Adani could never go ahead on the basis of the water threats alone.
It is grotesque that we should quibble over the cost of cutting emissions when our descendants must suffer destitution from our neglect.
It is extremely difficult to see western governments reacting with enough vigour in the short term – sadly it will more likely take a series of real disasters and huge human suffering before humanity changes course.
Will it then be too late? Our kids and grandkids will find out.
I believe that it is to late already. All that we can do in MHO is to fight a rearguard action.
The thing that I can’t fathom is that in all the blather about climate change and its effects, nobody seems to be talking about, let alone doing anything, about mitigating the obvious results of this change.
There is a bit of a kerfuffle about a river drying up and some dead fish, but when all is said and done,a lot will be said and nothing done. Apart from some duck shoving.
Where are the scientific groups, environment experts, vested interests, farmers and lawmakers seeking some solution? Not everyone will receive satisfaction and it will be one hell of a fight but it has to be done.
Where are the study groups on what will be the effect of lack of rain, temperature rise etc. on crops, stock ,people, cities, railways , roads, health, in fact everything. Can it be reduced, can it be dealt with, how?
If we believe the LNP and Newscrap Ltd. it costs too much to do anything to try and reduce climate change, how much is it going to cost to deal with the effects of climate change. Even if we only consider the already observable ones, never mind the developing ones.
The pommy reserve bank came up with a number for England of 20 Billion Pounds, But didn’t say if it was per year, per month, or until the end of life on earth. Has anyone come up with a similar guess for Australia?
Keep fit folks your’e going to need to be flexible enough to be able to kiss your ass good-by. (As the seppos say),
I don’t see the current Liberals paying any attention to the report whatsoever, even Labor’s only doing the bare minimum. At a time when Britain can boast a record 100+ days now without using coal power for energy and most of Europe is making real strides in dealing with climate change, we’re still talking about opening coal mines and even coal fired power plants. Pathetic!
I hope all the 18 to 30 year olds out there are voting accordingly, its their future at stake.