Saving Species More Important Than Climate Change
In every corner of the globe the evidence of the global biodiversity crisis is now impossible to ignore.
The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.
The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure. The UN's biodiversity report - dubbed the Stern for Nature - is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher - between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them. In the UK, a third of high priority species and two thirds of habitats are declining, according to government figures that emerged today on the UK's Biodiversity Action Plan. Since 1994 despite the extra attention provided by the plan, 5% of the species it covered are thought to have gone extinct. Around the world the picture is as bad or worse: the International Union for the Conservation of Nature believes one in five mammals, one in three amphibians and one in seven birds are extinct or globally threatened, and other species groups still being assessed are showing similar patterns. Simon Stuart, a senior IUCN scientist, has warned that for the first time since the dinosaurs humans are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than new species can evolve. For decades, nature lovers have watched the fens being drained, or noticed the decline of cuckoos in spring and butterflies in summer. But until recently these changes have been overshadowed by growing fears about the impact of climate change. However, as the impact of these species losses around the world have mounted - riots over food shortages, costly floods and landslides, expensive bills for cleaning polluted water, and many more disasters - attention has finally started to turn to the impact of human beings literally consuming the planet's natural resources.
