Scientists don't know how much wildlife is suffering It's difficult to determine a comprehensive figure. It's not easy to count wild animals on land and at sea. The majority of countries don't have national monitoring systems.
Every two years, there is an effort to fill this void. The World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London collaborated to create the Living Planet index. The report has resulted in inaccurate headlines multiple times.
The most alarming number issued by 89 authors from around the world was the 69 percent decline in monitored populations of vertebrates from 1970 to the present day. In only 48 years, that number has doubled. As nations prepare to meet in Montreal this December in an effort to agree on a new global plan to protect biodiversity it is a staggering figure. Do you think it means anything?
The number is only for mammals, birds, lizards, and fish. Even though they make up the majority of animal species, they are not included.
Did wild vertebrates decline by 69 percent?
It is not possible to say yes.
The study tracks selected populations of 5,320 species and adds more each year as new data becomes available. The population of whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico was counted from small planes flying low over the water and birds were counted on cliffs. Camera traps and trail droppings can be used to estimate the population.
The update includes over 30,000 such populations.
It is tempting to think that the share of monitored wildlife that was wiped out is the result of the 69 percent decline in these populations. That is not the case. An example of why can be found in an amendment to the report.
Birds, bears and sharks are what the authors imagined. The birds dropped to five from 25. The bears go from 50 to 45. The sharks go from 20 to 8.
The decline is 50 percent. The total number of animals decreased by about 40%.
The purpose of the index is to understand how populations change over time.
The area is facing a shortage of water. The story of the Netherlands has been told all over its boggy landscape. The Dutch are trying to engineer once again their way to safety by figuring out how to hold onto water instead of throwing it out.
A lot of rain. The monsoon in South Asia brings life-giving water to 25% of the world's population. Climate change is making the monsoon more unpredictable, less reliable and even dangerous, with more violent rain and dry spells.
The smoke from the wildfire is polluted. According to new research, smoke from wildfires may be reversing decades of improvements in Western air quality. There was an increase in particulate pollution from smoke that was the same amount as the improvement in air quality from regulating factories and other sources of pollution.
Relinquishing a large amount of money. The founder of the outdoor apparel maker, Yvon Chouinard, gave his company's ownership to a trust and an organization dedicated to fighting climate change. At a time when billionaires talk about making the world a better place, they often don't match reality.
Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at WWF and an author of the report, said that the Living Planet index is a contemporary view on the health of the populations that underpin the functioning of nature.
Monitoring populations end up in the index. They don't represent a large sample. The data that is available is reflected by them. It's possible that there is bias in which species are tracked.
There is a debate about whether a small number of populations call into question the overall results. A study in Nature found that 3 percent of the population was driving a decline. The global trend changed to an increase when those were removed.
There was a lot of response to the paper in Nature, as well as additional explanation and stress testing for this year's update. Half of the populations in the Living Planet index are stable or increasing. The descent was steep when they tried to exclude populations with the most drastic changes.
The head of the indicators and assessments unit at the Zoological Society of London said that even after removing 10 percent of the complete data set, there was still a 65 percent decline.
I agree. Some scientists think the report underestimates the crisis because it doesn't take into account the decline in the number of salamanders.
Over time, the trend is not changing.
Henrique M. Pereira was not involved in this year's report, but he said that the situation is not improved every year. We have been able to slow down the decline.
The drop in Latin America and the Caribbean was the worst in the region. Most of the time the pattern was found in freshwater fish. Asia and the Pacific saw 55 percent of the world's population. The decline was smaller for Europe-Central Asia and North America. The data doesn't show the extent of the losses in those two areas.
Scientists are aware of what is causing the loss of flora and fauna. The top driver on land is agriculture, as people turn forests and other environments into farmland. It is fishing at the ocean. There are ways to do both in a more sustainable way.
According to the report, the consequences of climate change are expected to become the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the coming decades.
The nations of the world will meet in December to try to reach a new agreement. The last one didn't meet its goals. Evidence for how to succeed is offered by the Living Planet report. The support of local communities is crucial to the success of conservativism.
She said that it's possible to have increases in populations when focused on incorporating the community. It's the bright spot.
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