Since 1970, Animal Populations Cut in Half

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has released its annual Living Planet Report for 2014, and while last year gave us the good with the bad, after only the first few sentences of the foreword and message by WWF International Director General, Marco Lambertini, it becomes pretty clear that this year's conclusions cannot avoid some fairly depressing and grim realities (my emphasis).

"This latest edition of the Living Planet Report is not for the faint-hearted. One key point that jumps out and captures the overall picture is that the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another way, in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half. These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth – and the barometer of what we are doing to our own planet, our only home. We ignore their decline at our peril."

The various facts and stats in the report will not do much to engender hope either.

• Falling by 76 per cent, populations of freshwater species declined more rapidly than marine (39 per cent) and terrestrial (39 per cent) populations.
• Only around 880 mountain gorillas remain in the wild – about 200 of them in Virunga National Park. (My note: Although they have experienced a recent slight population increase, one can only surmise — due to lack of historical census data — that this number is down from tens or possibly hundreds of thousands before hunting, war, disease, and destruction of forest habitat since the year 1900 caused extreme declines.)
• Even though slightly more populations are increasing than declining, the magnitude of the population decline is much greater than that of the increase, resulting in an overall reduction since 1970.
• Due to a rapid loss of their traditional habitat, forest elephants had been restricted to a mere 6-7 per cent of their historic range (circa 1900) by 1984. Further recent analysis suggests that, across the forest elephant’s range, the population size declined by more than 60 per cent between 2002 and 2011 – primarily due to increasing rates of poaching for ivory (Maisels et al., 2013).
• The sharpest declines in marine populations have been observed in the tropics and the Southern Ocean. Species in decline in the tropics include marine turtles, particularly in the Indo-Pacific realm, and seabirds overall in the Atlantic, with bycatch from fishing being one of the main drivers behind these trends. Among the fish species showing declines are many shark species, which have suffered as a result of overfishing both in tropical Atlantic (Baum and Myers, 2004) and Pacific regions (Clarke et al., 2013b).
• ...many rhino populations in Africa (Figure 18) have become regionally extinct or are in decline, despite largely occurring inside protected areas.
• There are fewer than 5,000 black rhino and about 20,000 white rhino left in the wild (Emslie, 2012a; 2012b).
• Even under optimistic assumptions on the ability of coral reefs to rapidly adapt to thermal stress, one- to two-thirds of all the word’s coral reefs are projected to experience long-term degradation (Frieler et al., 2013).
• Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year. This “overshoot” is possible because – for now – we can cut trees faster than they mature, harvest more fish than the oceans can replenish, or emit more carbon into the atmosphere than the forests and oceans can absorb.

That last couple of bullets serve as a reminder that, although it is presently not the greatest culprit, climate change is playing a significant role in the observed species population declines.



And it does not take an advanced degree in climatology to realize that as global warming worsens so will its negative biodiversity impacts.

Past climate changes were slower than those anticipated for the 21st century, but even these drove significant ecosystem shifts and extinctions (Williams et al., 2011).

We just have to ask ourselves if we want to keep wiping out the wildlife on our planet. It's that simple. Is a world barren of most higher forms of animal life except us what we really want? Could anyone in his or her right mind possibly answer yes to that question? Forget environmental concerns and the troubling implications for our own survival for a moment. What will it mean for each one of us psychologically to look out over a land and seascape once teaming with life, gone quiet and empty, and know that we are responsible for the disturbing level of sterilization? Can we not find a way to control ourselves?