The 2022 Living Planet Report
11/3/22 – Assessing a declining natural world
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
In July of this year, the UN General Assembly officially recognized a new universal human right: the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. As I’ve written here before, it comes as a surprise to many of us that we don’t already have this right enshrined in law. In fact, legal protection for our relationship to the natural world is still rare, even though a whole body of law exists to permit polluting activities that harm that relationship. So, in this strange world we inhabit, the new U.N. resolution is both long overdue and radically subversive. It may prove profoundly useful, even if it isn’t yet legally binding.
Looking deeper, the resolution recognizes that
the impact of climate change, the unsustainable management and use of natural resources, the pollution of air, land and water, the unsound management of chemicals and waste, and the resulting loss in biodiversity interfere with the enjoyment of this right - and that environmental damage has negative implications, both direct and indirect, for the effective enjoyment of all human rights. [emphasis original]
This is, I think, part of a flanking maneuver by the brilliant, rational, and patient policy-makers of the world who have known for decades three hard truths: 1) our behavior toward other life on Earth is brutal and unsustainable, 2) our growing disruption of the climate is rapidly accelerating that unsustainability, and 3) the people most hurt by Anthropocene impacts have the least responsibility for them. This knowledge has driven the good, optimistic people in governments and NGOs to wage an existential battle for a more ecological and ethical world, despite Dorothy Parker’s witty warning that “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
I call it a flanking maneuver because it’s a quieter effort alongside the more public IPCC-led fight to slow, stop, and eventually reverse climate change. On another flank, the UN created its Sustainable Development Goals to recognize that we need to deal with global inequality and environmental catastrophes at the same time if we want to solve either.
This new resolution of the universal human right to a clean and healthy environment weaves together the three strands I noted above. After all, if every human has a right to a healthy environment, then the climate crisis, the loss of global biodiversity, and the other humanitarian crises (e.g. pandemics and polluted drinking water) caused by large-scale erosion of the environment are all violations of that right.
So, by my assessment, the UN has cobbled together an interlocking three-part strategy. To the extent that it motivates the world to 1) put into place effective climate treaties, 2) successfully reduce inequality, and/or 3) convince nations to enforce their citizens’ right to a healthy environment, it will make a critical difference in the quality of life for us and our community of species.
In December, a fourth part to the UN strategy may fall into place: the COP15 Biodiversity Conference and the final push to hammer out a Global Framework for Biodiversity. Of all the pieces to the UN strategy, perhaps the least public and least understood is the push to protect biodiversity. We all have some sense of what needs to happen to reduce climate chaos, to level the playing field between rich and poor, and to protect our right to clean air and water, but what’s our plan for reversing our current trajectory toward a mass extinction? We can’t get there merely by making a few more national parks.
Which brings me back to the Living Planet Report for 2022. As promised last week, I’ll take a dive into each of its three chapters to give you a sense of how the report assesses the status of life on Earth, and what it’s offering for solutions. I’ll cover the first two chapters on assessment this week, and spend next week talking about their plan for building a “nature-positive” society.
The Global Double Emergency
As I noted last week, the report emphasizes from its first page to its last that we cannot separate the fate of the climate and the fate of the world’s plants and animals. That twinned fate, of climate and biodiversity, are the “double emergency.” As biodiversity loss worsens, so does the climate, because forests, soils, and oceans, for example, are less able to absorb CO2 and more likely to emit it. And as the climate warms, more plants and animals are pushed to the brink.
Biodiversity is not merely the variety of species. It’s defined here as
the variety of life and the interactions between living things at all levels on land, in water and in the sea and air – genes, populations, species and ecosystems.
This is important. As snails and microbes and bats and corals diminish or disappear, so too do an astonishing variety of genes, of interactions between species, and of connections between ecosystems. Lose the seabirds and the islands suffer. Overheat the rivers and the shellfish disappear. Most of the natural world’s complexity is invisible to us. The tapestry of life is made of threads, yes, but also of the innumerable junctions between those threads.
So far, the primary causes of species decline and ecosystem loss are agriculture, development, pollution, ever-increasing exploitation of resources, and the invasive species we’ve moved around the world. There are too many of us taking too much and moving too fast. Before long, though, climate change will become the primary driver of biodiversity loss, as whole regions become destabilized under increasing heat, droughts, floods, sea level rise, and movement of species. The headline items at that stage will be the loss of coral reef systems, the melting of Arctic permafrost (with subsequent methane emission), and the Amazon’s switch from CO2 sink to CO2 emitter, but the changes and their consequences will be everywhere.
Already, the chapter explains, increased heat is
driving mass mortality events in trees, birds, bats, and fish. A single hot day in 2014 killed more than 45,000 ‘flying fox’ bats in Australia. Climate changes have also been linked to the loss of whole populations of more than 1,000 plant and animal species.
Birds dropped from the sky in this summer’s extraordinary heat waves in Pakistan, India, and China. Northern forests have been burned by megafires or dried out by unusual drought or nibbled to death by unchecked beetles and moths. The dark line on the horizon is the fear, if warming isn’t halted soon enough, that there will be so much “positive climate feedback” – e.g. forests, peatlands, and tundra becoming net emitters of greenhouse gases rather than carbon sinks – that the rate of warming will rapidly increase.
Forests, which are still being lost at a rate of about 25 million acres per year, are a particularly important nexus between climate and biodiversity. The preservation and replanting of forests is vital for both, not least because forests act as a climate regulator at both the local and global levels. For human communities too, this regulation by forests of weather and rainfall and temperature are critical for our own food, shelter, and comfort.
And that’s the other main point this chapter makes. Human welfare is linked inextricably with the health of natural systems. The key metric here, from the point of view of the UN, is the set of Sustainable Development Goals:
Climate change and biodiversity loss are not only environmental issues, but economic, development, security, social, moral and ethical issues too – and they must therefore be addressed together along with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)… Unless we conserve and restore biodiversity, and limit human-induced climate change, almost none of the SDGs can be achieved – in particular food and water security, good health for everyone, poverty alleviation, and a more equitable world.
Whether it’s protecting or replanting mangrove forests, protecting wildlife corridors for those species that will be on the move in a warming world, or encouraging tailor-made climate adaptation strategies at the local level, there is a long and complex list of things to be done for the protection of plants and animals (including us) in this new world we’re making.
The Speed and Scale of Change
Given the title of this chapter, I expected some discussion of, well, the speed and scale of change in the Anthropocene. (I wrote about it in a piece called It’s About Time, back in June of 2021.) Instead, the chapter largely discusses and illustrates how the losses in global biodiversity are being assessed and measured. The opening pages describe the 2022 Living Planet Index and its findings, which I outlined last week, though there is an additional example here of the fate of the 31 species of oceanic sharks and rays. More than three-quarters of them are “threatened with an elevated risk of extinction,” and no one really knows for sure what the impacts on ocean ecosystems will be as these apex predators decline further.
To measure the risks of extinction and the possibility of recovery, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) puts out two assessments: the Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status for Species. The Red List has so far assessed more than 140,000 species
using information on life-history traits, population, distribution size and structure, and their change over time to assign them to one of eight categories: Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, or Data Deficient.
The Red List Index uses this data to determine the “survival probability” of species given current and projected conditions. Meanwhile, the IUCN’s Green Status for Species, a new tool, measures any ongoing recovery of species populations and, based on what we know we can do to help, their conservation potential. Together, these data have been used to map the “global hotspots” for biodiversity loss and, more optimistically, the areas where we should concentrate our protection efforts.
The Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), from the UK’s Natural History Museum, assesses how well an ecological community is doing under the pressure of human activities. It creates an approximate percentage of “the original number of species that remain and their abundance in any given area.” Notably, the 54,000 species used to create the BII include plants, fungi, and insects, species usually omitted from other biodiversity assessments that focus only on mammals, birds, and amphibians.
The BII is expressed as a percentage, with 100% being a pristine ecosystem and 0% being fully erased. Anything above 90% is considered intact and fully functioning, while anything below 30% indicates “biodiversity has been depleted and the ecosystem could be at risk of collapse.”
The broad middle between 90% and 30%, which describes most of the world, is a muddle of semi-functional environments that await our decision to either degrade them further or help them return to full health. I did a quick search of the data (which you can too) and found the U.S. is hovering, surprisingly, around 70%. I have to assume that the vast wilds of Alaska are throwing off the curve, since very little area in the lower 48 states is intact. Two other examples: New Zealand is at 60% and projected to stay there, while Nigeria is expected to plunge from 50% to 40% over the next 30 years. See the map for the big picture.
The chapter has only a brief write-up on another assessment tool, Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP), which attempts to measure the beneficial relationships between the people and ecosystems of a given area. The purpose of the assessment, as with the Red List and the BII, is to project what’s lost as those relationships degrade.
Finally, the chapter ends with several pages devoted to perhaps the most obvious – if still overlooked – counterpoint to the speed and scale of our disruptions: indigenous leadership in protecting and managing the natural world. It’s worth quoting the introductory paragraph fully, because each sentence clearly articulates an important point:
Around the globe, it is clear that leaders in dominant societies have failed to control the human activities driving climate change and habitat loss, while Indigenous lands and waters have been successfully taken care of over millennia. In Canada, Brazil and Australia, for instance, vertebrate biodiversity in Indigenous territories equals or surpasses that found within formally protected areas. Far from the colonial idea of separating people from nature in order to preserve it – and the concept of the pristine or wilderness free from human influence – Indigenous approaches to conservation regularly place reciprocal people-place relationships at the centre of cultural and care practices. These approaches hinge on systems of Indigenous knowledge which include scientific and ecological understandings that are carried across generations through language, story, ceremony, practice and law.
Examples of Indigenous-centered projects in Guinea, Zambia, and Australia are discussed, but the idea I want to leave you with from this chapter is the importance of “two-eyed seeing.” For a rational path to a healthier future, we need the best of both Indigenous and mainstream knowledge systems. We need one eye to see the world through a modern scientific lens, and the other eye to see the world as it has been seen for the long millennia before the great disruption began. With both eyes open and a devotion to the cause, we can slow the losses and then replenish the living world.
Again, I recommend you take a little time to explore the 2022 Living Planet Report, and keep an ear out for what happens in December’s COP15 Biodiversity Conference and its extraordinarily important effort to hammer out a Global Framework for Biodiversity. The UN and its tireless efforts to create a sustainable civilization are paying off, if slowly.
I’ll be back next week with the report’s ideas for how to build a better, more vibrant world.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
Some very good news: From the Atlantic, the very-under-the-radar announcement that the U.S. just ratified a powerful climate treaty. The hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in your AC or refrigerator are hundreds of thousands of times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, and now they will be phased out of existence over the next several years. Officially, this is known as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. The Protocol was the very successful treaty signed decades ago to phase out chemicals (CFCs) that harmed Earth’s ozone layer. (I’ve intended to write an essay on the ozone story for a year now… This new success will become part of it.)
From the New York Times, a getting-to-know-your-biological-address story about a particular group of insects, those “little things that run the world.” A few of you may remember my brief write-up on Charley Eiseman and his remarkable backyard study of leafminers in the second issue of the Field Guide. Here the Times article reveals the importance if Eiseman’s work and the necessity of letting native insects chew on our plants and trees. Those beautiful tracks and spots on the leaves aren’t problems; they’re relationships.
Also from the Times, the importance of ancient trees and the imperative to save them:
“The stakes and the scale of forest stewardship have changed in the climate crisis. Large-scale preservation of habitat is no longer enough; it must be paired with rapid decarbonization of the economy. Otherwise, the future for old growth is ashes.”
From Yale e360, an interview with David Quammen, one of our best natural history writers and one of the earliest voices – 10 years before COVID-19 – warning of the likelihood of a global pandemic. He has a new book out on the scientific hunt for the origin of the current pandemic, with new warnings for the next one.
From Space.com, another in the daily reminders that we need an all-out effort to cut needless methane emissions. New space-based tools are helping. The latest, a NASA project called EMIT, is strapped to the outside of the space station and has, as a side project, been identifying super-emitters of methane around the globe.
From Nature, global deforestation slowed last year, but not enough to meet climate goals. As I write this, though, Brazil’s remaining forests might receive an important reprieve, as Bolsonaro has lost the election.
