Blog post by Prof Richard Gregory, Head of Species Monitoring and Research, RSPB Centre for Conservation Science and Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, University College London

Next week is an important week for nature because the Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will issue its ground-breaking inter-governmental report on the state of our planet that will describe past losses and future prospects for both nature and humans.

Nature matters because it helps provide the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the water you drink. It helps to provide and maintain fertile soils, our medicines, a stable climate, and gives us places for recreation and solace, and provides wonder. Nature is amazing and should be valued for its own sake as well as what it provides to us. All species are interconnected and often depend on each other, so losing one species in a chain may not seem like much on its own, but each loss weakens the chain that benefits us all. Biodiversity loss is bad for nature and bad for people. It is said that species are to ecosystems what rivets are to a plane's wing – losing species or rivets is an alarming signal. 

We will learn more next week, but we are told the new report will highlight shocking losses that have hit the natural world and will warn that the future is bleak for tens of thousands of species.

European bird assesment 

Bringing this closer to home, the work of the RSPB will contribute to the assessment and a new paper published this week provides a taster of what is to come and the sheer scale of loss. Our new paper presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the trends in widespread and common European bird populations using data from 28 countries over 35 years from 1980 to 2015.

A composite, multispecies index of common farmland birds has fallen significantly by 60% over this period, while in contrast the equivalent multispecies index for common forest birds has remained roughly stable. The decline in the farmland bird index was steepest 1980-1990 (falling at a rate of 4% per annum) and less steep subsequently 1990-2015 (falling at a rate of 2% per annum); but the declines continues. The loss of farmland bird populations equates to the loss of hundreds of millions of individual birds across Europe. The scale of loss is shocking.

It is well established that the precipitous decline in bird populations and other farmland wildlife in Europe has been driven by land use policies and many have called for radical reform of the EU policy that governs farming, the Common Agricultural Policy.  Policy reform is the key to the recovery of farmland wildlife in Europe. But this is not just a European issue and BirdLife International recently declared ‘industrial farming’ as the number one extinction threat to birds globally, so the scale of the threat to nature is huge.

The stability of widespread bird populations living in forest to some extent masks the decline of some vulnerable and specialist birds, and is less well understood, but many forest birds have benefitted from tree planting and forest cover is thought to be increasing in most European countries. At the same time, we know that intensive forest management has significantly modified native forest (less than 1% of the old-growth forest area remains in southern Finland) and this has driven biodiversity losses. Indeed, BirdLife International identify ‘logging’ the number two threat to birds globally and deforestation may have severe knock-on effects for climate, soils, flooding, biodiversity and indigenous people, as readers will know.

In Europe at least, we have witnessed a truly shocking loss of farmland wildlife, but relative stability in common forest birds, next week IPBES will release its global assessment on the state of the planet and provide the most comprehensive and likely damning report of its kind to date. Now it is time to act.

Reference: Gregory, R.D., Skorpilova, J., Voříšek, P. & Butler, S. (2019).  An analysis of trends, uncertainty and species selection shows contrasting trends of widespread forest and farmland birds in Europe. Ecological Indicators 103, 676-687, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.04.064.

Note: Data come from the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS), a joint initiative of the European Bird Census Council and BirdLife International, which aims to use common birds as indicators of the general state of nature using monitoring data on changes in breeding populations across Europe. The PECBMS is funded by the Royal Society for Protection of Birds and the European Commission.  We thank the many expert volunteers who contributed to national bird surveys and the many coordinators and their supporting institutions.