IPBES - Global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services

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

Today sees the launch of the biggest and best health check on the state of our planet carried out to date and the diagnosis and prognosis are not good. Driven and coordinated by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the new global assessment has been prepared by over 150 scientists from over 50 countries, with contributions from several hundred others. They have evaluated changes and trends over the past 50 years and considered their implications for our economies, livelihoods, food security and quality of life. They describe both past losses and gains, and model future prospects for nature and humans. The picture the report paints is not a good one.

Nature is declining globally and at rates unprecedented in human history. We are pushing our planet’s life support system to breaking point through our own actions and choices, and only through our actions and choices can we turn this around. Current actions are insufficient in their ambition, scale and pace, and the report calls for transformational change.

Arguably we have all the solutions. We can feed the world, improve nutrition, increase rural prosperity and equality, whilst protecting nature and saving our climate, but urgency, action and cooperation are vital if we are to achieve this goal.

Photo: The IPBES Global Assessment Report is the first to rank the relative impact of drivers of biodiversity loss.Credit: IPBES

Here is my take on the key messages drawing heavily from the summary for policy makers.  We are told:

Nature’s contributions to people

1. The contributions nature makes to people are fundamental for the existence and richness of human life on Earth and not easily replaced. From genes to species, the thing we call biodiversity is humanity’s common heritage and safety net, and depressingly it is declining fast. The global environmental commons of land, ocean, atmosphere and biosphere, upon which we depend, are being altered to an unparalleled degree, with cascading, knock-on impacts on the ecosystems around us.
2. Nature’s contributions to people are often distributed unequally and different demands create trade-offs among contributions, both in their production and use by society. So, for example, while food production today is sufficient to satisfy global needs, approximately 11 per cent of the world’s population is still undernourished.  The rapid expansion in the production of food, fibre and bioenergy has occurred at a cost to nature and many other contributions to human quality of life.
3. Over the past 50 years, agricultural production, fish harvest, bioenergy production and harvest of materials have increased, while virtually all regulating and ‘non-material’ contributions of nature have declined. For example, agricultural crop production has increased by threefold since 1970 and raw timber production has increased 45 per cent, reaching some 4 billion cubic metres in 2017. Meanwhile, however, indicators of contributions associated with ecosystem regulation, such as soil organic carbon or pollinator diversity, have declined, suggesting that such gains are not sustainable, with important implications and negative knock-on effects.
4. Human actions have significantly altered nature across most of the globe, more so in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal ecosystems than in the open ocean. Today, 75 per cent of the terrestrial environment, 40 per cent of the marine environment and 50 per cent of streams are severely altered. Although the rate of forest loss has slowed at the global scale, forest area and tree cover continue to decline rapidly in the highly biodiverse tropics, where the loss of unaltered forest landscapes has even started to accelerate.
5. More species are threatened with extinction now than at any other time in human history. Around one million species are estimated to be threatened with extinction many within decades.

Photo: The contributions nature makes to people are fundamental for the existence and richness of human life on Earth and not easily replaced. Photo by Rosemary Despres (rspb-images.com)

Direct and indirect drivers of change

6. The rate of global change during the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history. The drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact have been changes in land and sea use, exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species. Those drivers reflect indirect drivers of change underpinned by social values.  Prominent indirect drivers include increases in population and per capita consumption, changes in nature deterioration per unit of consumption due to technological innovation and, critically, governance and accountability. Trade has shifted where goods are produced, contributing to opportunities for economic development, but also increasing inequities in both economic development and environmental pressures.
7. Human-driven climate change is exacerbating and increasing the impact of other drivers on nature and society.
8. In the past 30 years, global trade has increased eightfold, coupled with a six-fold increase in the global economy, and the demand for living materials from nature has doubled to meet the increasing demands of a growing global population and of ever more distant consumers, shifting the environmental burden of consumption and production. Increasing demand for food, timber and fibre in higher-income countries is often satisfied by production in distant, lower-income countries.

Responses and trajectories

9. Implementation of policy responses and actions to conserve nature and manage it more sustainably has progressed, but not sufficiently to change the drivers and stem the loss of nature. It is highly likely that most of CBD’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 will in consequence be missed.
10. The negative trends in nature and the contribution it makes to people are projected to continue to 2050 and beyond in all model scenarios, except those that include transformative change, due to the projected impact of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms, and climate change. Pollution and invasive alien species are likely to exacerbate those patterns.  Significantly, there are also large regional differences in the patterns of future biodiversity loss and changes in nature’s contributions to people, with the largest projected impacts in the tropics and the south.  This is important.

Nature can be restored

11. The global environment can be safeguarded through enhanced international cooperation to promote transformative change. Review and renewal of agreed environment-related international goals and targets represent unique opportunities to create and generate transformative change.
12. Risks related to uncertainties and complexities in transformations towards sustainability can be reduced through governance approaches that are integrative, inclusive, informed and adaptive.
13. Five main levers can create transformative change by tackling the underlying indirect drivers of nature loss. The big five are: (1) developing incentives for environmental responsibility and removing perverse subsidies; (2) reforming sectoral and segmented decision-making to promote integration across sectors and jurisdictions; (3) taking pre-emptive and precautionary actions to mitigate the deterioration of nature and monitoring their outcomes; (4) managing for robustness in the face of uncertainty and complexity; and (5) strengthening the rule of law and the implementation of environmental laws and policies to protect nature.
14. Feeding humanity and enhancing the conservation and sustainable use of nature are complementary, not competing, goals that can be achieved together through: (1) developing sustainable agricultural and aquacultural systems; (2) the protection of remaining key native habitats; (3) and large-scale ecological restoration.
15. Sustaining fisheries and conserving marine species and ecosystems can be achieved through coordinated interventions on land and in the oceans, including multi-level coordination on the use of the open oceans.
16. While land-based mitigation activities, including reducing deforestation, restoring nature and improving management of agricultural systems, have potential for climate change mitigation, the large-scale deployment of bioenergy plantations and afforestation are likely to offset the positive effects.
17. Nature-based and nature-friendly solutions can be cost-effective in making cities more sustainable, which are crucial for global sustainability.
18. Finally, and significantly, a key constituent of sustainable pathways and production is the reform of global financial and economic systems to engineer a global sustainable economy.

This then is a rapid download on an amazing new assessment - and I have only skimmed its surface. 

There is dark and light in the message.  While nature is declining globally at an unprecedented rate, and we are pushing our planet’s life support to near breaking point, we genuinely have all the solutions to tackle the environmental crisis that is threatening our existence. Now it is time to act. The real value of nature needs to be recognised by society and, as the report says, there needs to be transformational change.