Global Biodiversity Down 30 Percent in 40 Years

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Yahoo News 14 May 12;

The world's biodiversity is down 30 percent since the 1970s, according to a new report, with tropical species taking the biggest hit. And if humanity continues as it has been, the picture could get bleaker.

Humanity is outstripping the Earth's resources by 50 percent — essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year, according to the 2012 Living Planet Report, produced by conservation agency the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Colby Loucks, the director of conservation sciences at WWF, compared humanity to bad houseguests.

"We're emptying the fridge, we're not really taking care of the lawn, we're not weeding the flower beds and we're certainly not taking out the garbage," Loucks said.

Burning through resources

The biannual Living Planet report is designed to call attention to the Earth's "invisible economy," said Emily McKenzie, the director of the WWF's Natural Capital Program. Natural resources — and the rate at which humans burn through them — rarely appear on policymakers' balance sheets, McKenzie said.

But humanity is essentially in debt to Mother Earth, conservationists find. As of 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, humans were outstripping Earth's biocapacity by 50 percent. Biocapacity is the amount of renewable resources, land, and waste absorption (such as sinks for carbon dioxide) the Earth can provide. In other words, it takes the planet 1.5 years to restore what humanity burns through in a year. (The organization Global Footprint Network marks "Earth Overshoot Day" every year to draw attention to how fast humans use natural resources. In 2011, Earth Overshoot Day fell on Sept. 27, the day humans used up Earth's annual resources.)

The report scientists calculated the world's hogs when it comes to resources (called the ecological footprint) by determining each nation's productive land capacity and comparing it to the actual population and consumption per person. The United States has the fifth-largest ecological footprint of any nation on Earth, according to the report.

In order from most to least, the top 10 greediest resource users per capita are:

Qatar
Kuwait
United Arab Emirates
Denmark
United States
Belgium
Australia
Canada
The Netherlands
Ireland
Finland
Singapore
More of the list here

Struggling species

All of this resource use is taking a toll. The Living Planet report also tracks biodiversity and species populations across the globe. This year's report details a startling loss of biodiversity around the globe: A loss of 30 percent of biodiversity on average, meaning a major decline in the number of different species of plants, animals and other organisms. Temperate species are doing relatively well, Loucks said, but tropical species have declined by 60 percent since the 1970s. Freshwater tropical species are the hardest-hit, having declined by 70 percent in that time period.

Globally, terrestrial species declined by 25 percent between 1970 and 2008, WWF reports. Marine (non-freshwater) species declined by 20 percent.

Many of the group's proposed solutions to humanity's out-of-control resource use center around Rio+20, the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development set for June 20, 2012. The meeting is designed to help create pathways for sustainable development in the future, said Kate Newman, WWF's managing director of public sector initiatives. She cited the example of Mozambique, a poor country that may be home to one of the largest natural gas fields in the world. As international companies arrive to exploit this resource, local planners are concerned about how to make sure the entire nation benefits, she said.

In the same way, global decision-makers need to think long-term, Loucks said.

"As we're approaching a planet with 9 billion people on it, we need to find a global solution," he said. "The challenge for us is this is a long-term problem. This is the Earth for millennia. We need to move beyond the election cycle, beyond the quarterly report cycle."

World Living Beyond Its Resources, Summit Off-Track: WWF
Tom Miles PlanetArk 16 May 12;

Biodiversity has decreased by an average of 28 percent globally since 1970 and the world would have to be 50 percent bigger to have enough land and forests to provide for current levels of consumption and carbon emissions, conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.

Unless the world addresses the problem, by 2030 even two planet Earths would not be enough to sustain human activity, WWF said, launching its "Living Planet Report 2012", a biennial audit of the world's environment and biodiversity - the number of plant and animal species.

Yet governments are not on track to reach an agreement at next month's sustainable development summit in Rio de Janeiro, WWF International's director general Jim Leape said.

"I don't think anyone would dispute that we're nowhere near where we should be a month before the conference in terms of the progress of the negotiations and other preparations," Leape told reporters in Geneva.

"I think all of us are concerned that countries negotiating in the U.N. system for an outcome for Rio have not yet shown a willingness to really step up to meet these challenges. Those negotiations are clearly still tangled."

The Rio+20 meeting on June 20-22 is expected to attract more than 50,000 participants, with politicians under pressure from environmentalists to agree goals for sustainable development, in the spirit of the Rio Earth Summit that spawned the Kyoto Protocol 20 years ago.

Despite that pact aimed at cutting planet-warming carbon emissions, global average temperatures are on track for a "catastrophic increase" by the end of the century, WWF said.

Leape said there were many initiatives governments could take unilaterally without being "held hostage" to the wider negotiations for a binding global climate deal to replace Kyoto, which expires this year.

It said the world should move away from "perverse" subsidies on fossil fuels that amount to more than $500 billion annually and ensure global access to clean energy by 2030.

Asked why environmentalists were still struggling to win the argument that something needed to be done, Leape said: "Let's not underestimate the inertia in the system.

"We've built an economy over the last century that is built on fossil fuels and on a premise that the Earth's resources could not be exhausted. You see that conspicuously in the case of the oceans, where we've been taking fish as if there were no tomorrow, as if fish would just always be there.

"Secondly, we're doing it in the context of a marketplace that continues to send the wrong signals. So many of the costs that we're talking about are not built into the prices you see ... Markets can work well if prices are telling the truth but at the moment they don't, in hugely important ways."

Consumers were helping to turn the tide, he said, because of certification regimes that give products a seal of approval, forcing companies to abide by certain standards.

"You see a growing number of commodities in which this approach is rolling out. It's in timber, it's in fish, but it's also now in palm oil and in sugar and in cotton and so forth. I think that's part of creating market signals, to allow consumers to send signals, to show their preferences and to actually begin to build a market that's heading towards sustainability."

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Rio+20 summit leaders 'must improve nature protection'
Richard Black BBC News

Environmentalists say leaders at June's Rio+20 summit must urgently step up nature protection, as a report confirms a 30% decline in wildlife since 1970.

The Living Planet Report combines data on more than 9,000 populations of animals across the world.

Rio+20 is billed as a chance for world leaders to put global society on a sustainable path.

But the report's main authors, WWF, say progress on nature protection and climate change is "glacial".

"The Rio+20 conference is an opportunity for the world to get serious about the need for development to be made sustainable," said David Nussbaum, CEO of WWF-UK.

"We need to elevate the sense of urgency, and I think this is ultimately not only about our lives but the legacy we leave for future generations."

The Living Planet Report uses data on trends seen in various species across the world, compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

Further analysis from the Global Footprint Network aims to calculate how sustainable our global society is in terms of its overall ecological footprint - a composite measure of issues such as fossil fuel burning, use of cropland to grow food, and consumption of wood and wild-caught fish.
Tropical waste

For this edition of the report, ZSL has examined more species (2,600) and more populations of those species (9,014) than ever before.

Overall, these populations show a decline of about 30% since 1970 - the same figure as in the last edition, published two years ago.

Tropical species show a decline of more than 60%, while in temperate regions there has been an average recovery of about 30%.

The worst affected species are those in tropical lakes rivers, whose numbers have fallen by 70% since 1970.

The director of the ZSL's Institute of Zoology, Professor Tim Blackburn, likened the figures to a stock market of the natural world.

"There would be panic of the FTSE index showed a decline like this," he said.

"Nature is more important than money. Humanity can live without money, but we can't live without nature and the essential services it provides."

One of the draft recommendations for Rio+20 is that governments should develop and use economic indicators that include valuation of "natural capital".

Cotton buds

The global footprint analysis, meanwhile, concludes that humanity is using one-and-a-half times more natural resources than the Earth can sustainably supply.

The Persian Gulf emerges as the region with the highest per-capita ecological footprint, with Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates topping the list of the least sustainable nations.

The US makes the top 10, which also includes Denmark, Belgium, Australia and Ireland. The UK ranks 27th.

A new measure that WWF has developed allows tracking of water scarcity in 405 river systems across the world on a monthly basis.

It reveals that 2.7 billion people experience a lack of water for at least one month each year.

The report highlights some examples of progress on sustainability, such as a programme in Pakistan that has helped cotton farmers slash water, pesticide and fertiliser use while generating the same yield.

It also highlights areas that could be tackled urgently, such as the 30% wastage of food caused by profligate behaviour in the West and by lack of storage infrastructure in developing countries.

Mr Nussbaum said it was not too late to turn existing trends around, but "we need to address this with the same urgency and determination with which we tackled the systemic financial crisis globally".

Earth's environment getting worse, not better, says WWF ahead of Rio+20
Swelling population, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring CO2 emissions squeeze planet's resources
Erin Hale guardian.co.uk 15 May 12;

Twenty years on from the Rio Earth summit, the environment of the planet is getting worse not better, according to a report from WWF.

Swelling population, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring carbon dioxide emissions mean humanity is putting a greater squeeze on the planet's resources then ever before. Particularly hard hit is the diversity of animals and plants, upon which many natural resources such as clean water are based.

"The Rio+20 conference next month is an opportunity for the world to get serious about the need for development to become sustainable. Our report indicates that we haven't yet done that since the last Rio summit," said David Nussbaum, WWF-UK chief executive.

The latest Living Planet report, published on Tuesday, estimates that global demand for natural resources has doubled since 1996 and that it now takes 1.5 years to regenerate the renewable resources used in one year by humans. By 2030, the report predicts it will take the equivalent of two planets to meet the current demand for resources.

Most alarming, says the report, is that many of these changes have accelerated in the past decade, despite the plethora of international conventions signed since the initial Rio Summit in 1992. Climate-warming carbon emissions have increased 40% in the past 20 years, but two-thirds of that rise occurred in the past decade.

The report, compiled by WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, compiles data from around the world on the ecological footprints of each country and the status of resources like water and forests. It also examines changes in populations of 2,688 animal species, with the latest available data coming from 2008.

The eighth report of its kind, the new Living Planet document, comes five weeks before Rio+20, the latest United Nations conference on sustainable development.

Nussbaum said: "We have taken some important steps forward: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is an important step, a way in which the world is seeking to come to agreement about [cutting] greenhouse gases. The Convention on Biological Diversity is an important way of the world identifying steps that can be taken in protecting biodiversity. But the pace in both cases is rather glacial. And unfortunately our lifestyles and the consequences of those are having an impact more quickly than the acts we are taking to protect the planet."

Wealthy countries have seen some improvement, with the Living Planet biodiversity index, rising 7% since 1970, as nature reserves and protections were introduced. But the biodiversity index has dropped by 60% in developing countries, where people depend more on nature. Demographic shifts have had a significant impact. The world's cities have seen a 45% increase in population since 1992, according to the Global Footprint Network, and urban residents typically have a much larger carbon footprint than their rural counterparts. The average Beijinger, says WWF, has a footprint three times the Chinese average, due to factors including private car use.

Water security is a growing concern in many parts of the world as population and agriculture drives demand, placing enormous stress on freshwater ecosystems and fishing zones, according to data from WWF.

"The Living Planet report shows that the biggest single drop in the living planet index is for freshwater species in tropical areas, which have shown a decline of 70% since 1970," said David Tickner, head of freshwater at WWF-UK.

A note of hope for the future, said the authors, is that the world could see peak population sometime this century. Though the population hit 7 billion in 2011, the UNEP reports the population growth rate has fallen from 1.65% to 1.2% since 1992, with women now having an average of 2.5 children.

See also Rising consumption, increased resource use by a growing population puts unbearable pressure on our Planet – WWF 2012 Living Planet Report on the WWF website.