Why Everyone's Talking About Biodiversity

Human activity is causing unparalleled environmental degradation and contributing significantly to global warming – we’ve already transformed more than 70 percent of the Earth’s land area from its natural state⁸. Land degradation includes deforestation, desertification and the loss of wetlands or grasslands.

One of the big promises made at COP26 was to not only halt but reverse deforestation by the end of the decade. It’s a tall order when you consider that 11.1 million hectares of tree cover was lost in tropical rainforests in 2021, while primary rainforest – particularly important for carbon storage and biodiversity – was destroyed at a rate of ten football pitches every minute⁹.

Global Forest Watch, an initiative of the World Resources Institute with partners including the University of Maryland, estimates that this tropical forest loss released 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions – on a par with India’s annual emissions⁷.

Likewise, oceans play a crucial environmental and socio-economic role for the planet – regulating climates, providing natural resources, enabling international trade, and ensuring livelihoods and food security for a large portion of the world’s population.

Ocean heat content was at a record level in 2020, with areas in temperate zones of the Atlantic and Pacific and towards the poles showing the biggest increases¹⁰. One of the starkest effects of this heating can be seen in coral bleaching in places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Coastal ecosystems such as seagrass, salt marshes and mangroves are also suffering. Kelp, coral and seagrass are «ecosystem engineers»¹¹, building physical structures that create habitats for other life – coral reefs support over a million species, for example – and also provide food and protection to people.

Yet acidification caused by dissolved carbon dioxide will also affect a wide range of organisms, from fish to algae.

The oceans absorb about 30 percent of our emissions and their pH has fallen by 0.1 units since industrial times, making the water far more acidic. This, in turn, is pushing the Earth’s oceans toward a mass extinction event at a level not seen in about 250 million years, when scientists believe up to 90 percent of marine organisms went extinct due to overheated, acidic and deoxygenated oceans¹².

Uncontrolled human activities are therefore putting the health of our oceans under threat, adversely affecting their biodiversity, their capacity to mitigate climate change, and putting at risk many communities’ sources of incomes and food. A disaster looms if we don’t act now.