EV Is Booming

1. Demand for electric vehicles is way out ahead of Supply
2. In spite of propaganda to the contrary, there're plenty of the mineral resources needed to create batteries, etc
3. The Inflation Reduction Act requires domestic production of some of the EV stuff
4. Wyoming is behaving about as stupidly as we'd expect a Dirty Fuels plutocracy to behave (The Hill - Wyoming Proposes Ban On EVs By 2035)

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions

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It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.

In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.

This is not just eye-popping growth; it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before, with many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition. It’s enough to make many optimistic observers giddy with anticipation of what’s to come.

What is to come?

It is tempting to believe that designing a future is as simple as drawing the right trajectory on a whiteboard. But as with everything else when it comes to climate, the challenge is bigger than that — indeed, the fact that trend lines are beginning to point in the right direction can be a kind of false comfort, since technologies like these don’t just descend from the cloud onto the world’s phones. And the scientist Vaclav Smil’s gloomy comparisons to previous energy transitions aside, the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. Do the familiar, S-shaped learning curves of technological adaptation mean that it should be very easy, and indeed remunerative, for the world to get on track to limit warming below two degrees Celsius, or even 1.5 degrees, as a much talked about paper produced by Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking has suggested? Or, as the scholar Jessica Jewell has argued in the journal Nature Energy and elsewhere, do the limitations of practical obstacles and political economy mean that, even assuming those encouraging learning curves, much more would have to be done to ensure technological adoption at that speed?

Here the E.V. revolution is an illuminating case study. To stabilize global temperatures, we have to get emissions basically all the way down to zero, not just reduce them — an interesting November paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests it might be better to aim for “approximately” net zero emissions, since it may be the case that global temperatures could stabilize even if emissions aren’t entirely eliminated. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels in cars, not just supplement the existing fleet with slightly more green alternatives. A rapid growth in market share isn’t itself sufficient, in other words, because — like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while.

Economists call this a problem of stocks rather than flows. In this case, while the “flows” are indeed impressive, the “stock” of E.V.s on the road is probably only 2 percent of the global fleet, which still isn’t close to 100 percent at all.

Rapid growth also opens up a new landscape of challenges. We used to worry whether there would be sufficient demand for electric vehicles, particularly given their cost and range limitations. But demand already outstrips supply, which, in addition to driving up the cost of E.V.s and creating manufacturing and delivery delays, has given rise to anxiety over the next roadblock: the empire of mineral extraction, refinement and production that has to be built to meet that. That obstacle may be in some ways smaller than it appears, as Hannah Ritchie, among others, has emphasized: We are not yet mining enough lithium to meet demand, but it’s not exactly a scarce resource, and even Ritchie’s relatively conservative estimates suggest there is more than enough for a battery vehicle revolution.

Those taking a broader view of the ecological costs of this project, like the activist Thea Riofrancos, worry over a different set of unresolved questions: Is it possible to design a system for extracting and producing these materials in anything close to a responsible way? One possible approach, flagged by the Volts newsletter writer David Roberts, among others: actually recycling batteries, treating lithium as a “renewable” rather than endlessly extracted resource.

Behind that challenge lies another: Will production of electric vehicles be interrupted by potential deglobalization in green industries or by America’s Inflation Reduction Act, which requires that a portion of E.V. batteries’ parts be sourced or manufactured domestically or by certain trading partners to qualify for tax credits? At the moment, China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined.

There are also problems of what the civil engineer Emily Grubert has memorably called the “mid-transition”: “this period in between kind of a stable fossil fuel dominated energy system and a future stable, clean energy dominated system.” It is easy enough to imagine the other side of any transition, particularly when so many forces are moving in the right direction. But you have to get to that other side, and that is not just a matter of building out the new system but also, crucially, of maintaining some of the old one too, and in proper balance.

If E.V.s and gas cars share the roads for a decade or two, how do you ensure or design the right mix of charging stations and gas pumps, and how do you map their locations? At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? These may seem like relatively technical questions, but the problems of the mid-transition extend to the matter of employment structures and pensions, the need for skilled labor to manage site cleanup and safety and the decline of funding from gas taxes for maintenance and infrastructure as gas consumption declines (if not all that rapidly to zero).

The vast majority of electric vehicles are now sold in the world’s richer economies, and mid-transition challenges like building out new charging infrastructure are potentially much larger in lower income countries. But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. It’s been something of a secret revolution here, too: In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. As with everything else on climate, it’s not one story unfolding but many, and all at once.

Motor Trend - Project X

And the gearheads and gadget freaks shall lead them to the promised land.

Playing Catch-Up

You could've won some good money betting against me on the probability that humans had pretty much beaten the ozone layer problem.

We haven't.

Turns out, China - unsurprisingly - has been telling us all (including the Chinese government) to take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' donut.

But that's changing for the better, and maybe that means we might actually have a chance to beat the Climate Change thing too.

Wish for luck

and then

work your ass off.

Restoration of the Ozone Layer Is Back on Track, Scientists Say

Rogue emissions from China of ozone-depleting chemicals had threatened to delay recovery by a decade. But the emissions were stopped, according to a U.N.-backed report.

The protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere could be restored within several decades, scientists said Monday, as recent rogue emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals from China have been largely eliminated.

In a United Nations-sponsored assessment, the scientists said that global emissions of CFC-11, a banned chemical that has been used as a refrigerant and in insulating foams, had declined since 2018 after increasing for several years. CFC-11 and similar chemicals, collectively called chlorofluorocarbons, destroy ozone, which blocks ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and otherwise harm people and other living things.

The scientists said that if current policies remained in place, ozone levels between the polar regions should reach pre-1980 levels by 2040. Ozone holes, or regions of greater depletion that appear regularly near the South Pole and, less frequently, near the North Pole, should also recover, by 2045 in the Arctic and about 2066 in Antarctica.

“Things continue to trend in the right direction,” said Stephen A. Montzka, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of the report’s authors. Dr. Montzka led a 2018 study that alerted the world that CFC-11 emissions had been increasing since 2012 and that they appeared to come from East Asia.

Investigations by The New York Times and others strongly suggested that small factories in Eastern China disregarding the global ban were the source.

The new emissions had threatened to undermine the Montreal Protocol, the treaty negotiated in the 1980s to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons in favor of more benign chemicals after it was discovered that chlorofluorocarbons were depleting atmospheric ozone.

At the time the head of the United Nations Environment Program, which oversees the protocol, called illegal production of CFC-11 “nothing short of an environmental crime which demands decisive action.” Dr. Montzka and others had said the rogue emissions, if they continued, could delay recovery of the ozone layer by as long as a decade.

The future of the Amazon. Some Brazilian scientists studying the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Amazon fear that the rainforest, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, may become a grassy savanna in a matter of decades — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.

Biodiversity agreement. Delegates from roughly 190 countries meeting in Canada approved a sweeping United Nations agreement to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030 and to take a slew of other measures against biodiversity loss. The agreement comes as biodiversity is declining worldwide at rates never seen before in human history.

The start of a new age? A panel of scientists took a step toward declaring a new interval of geological time: the Anthropocene, or age of humans. The amended timeline of Earth’s history would officially recognize that humankind’s effects on the planet had been so consequential as to bring the previous geologic period to a close.

A tiny nation’s diplomatic moves. Rising sea levels threaten the very existence of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu and its population of just over 300,000 people. The country’s president now wants a top international court to weigh in on whether nations are legally bound to protect others against climate risks.

Transition to renewables. Worldwide, growth in renewable power capacity is set to double by 2027, adding as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the past two decades, according to the International Energy Agency. Renewables are poised to overtake coal as the largest source of electricity generation by early 2025, the agency found.

A landmark deal at COP27. Diplomats from nearly 200 countries concluded two weeks of climate talks by agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the greenhouse gases from wealthy nations. The deal represented a breakthrough on one of the most contentious issues at the U.N. summit in Egypt.

But follow-up studies showed that emissions were declining, a sign that the Chinese government was successfully cracking down on the new CFC-11 production. The report said the rogue emissions had most likely delayed ozone layer recovery by a year.

The Chinese CFC-11 was very likely used as a blowing agent in making foam insulation. During foam production, some of the CFC-11 escapes into the atmosphere, where it can be detected and measured, but much of it is contained within the foam as it hardens.

In this way, the researchers said, the Chinese rogue production had contributed to the “banks” of chlorofluorocarbons that were produced worldwide before bans went into effect and are in foams as well as refrigeration equipment and fire-extinguishing systems. These existing chemicals are not yet in the atmosphere, but are being released slowly through foam deterioration and destruction, leaks or other means.

Dr. Montzka said the size of the Chinese contribution to the banks was not known. “But if the banks have been built up substantially, that would add a few more years to that expected delay in recovery,” he said.

Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization, said the elimination of the rogue emissions was another example of the success of the protocol, which is generally considered to be the most effective global environmental pact ever enacted.

Atmospheric monitoring, which is required by the protocol, detected the problem, Mr. Zaelke said, and brought it to the attention of the treaty’s directorate. “Without admitting guilt, the offending parties got their act together,” he said. “And the measurements are back where they should be.”

Under the protocol, assessments like the one issued Monday are required at least every four years. In addition to NOAA scientists, contributors included researchers with NASA, the World Meteorology Organization, the United Nations Environment Program and the European Commission.

The new assessment was the first to consider the effects on ozone of a potential type of climate intervention, or geo-engineering, meant to cool the atmosphere. The method, called stratospheric aerosol injection, would use airplanes or other means to distribute sulfur aerosols high in the atmosphere, where they would reflect some of the sun’s rays before they reach the surface.

The idea has drawn fierce opposition. Among other objections, opponents say that intervening in the climate in this way could have severe unintended consequences, potentially altering weather patterns worldwide. But many scientists and others say that at the least, research is needed, because warming may reach a point where the world becomes desperate to try such an intervention technique, perhaps temporarily to buy time before greenhouse gas reductions can have a significant effect.

David W. Fahey, director of NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory and a co-chairman of the protocol’s scientific assessment panel, said that some studies had shown an impact on ozone of sulfur aerosols, so the assessment team was given the task of looking into it.

The protocol “exists to protect the ozone layer, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it in dealing with ozone-depleting substances,” he said. Looking at stratospheric aerosol injection, “is in our wheelhouse,” he added.

There is a lot of uncertainty in their findings, Dr. Fahey said, but the basic message is that trying to cool the planet by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit), say, through the use of sulfur aerosols, would have some effect on ozone. But it “will not destroy the ozone layer and create catastrophic consequences,” he said.

“We actually already knew that because Mount Pinatubo did the experiment for us,” he said, referring to the huge volcanic explosion in the Philippines in 1991 that sent enormous amounts of sulfur gas into the stratosphere, creating an aerosol haze akin to a geo-engineering effort.

That eruption temporarily cooled the planet by about 0.5 degree Celsius, Dr. Fahey said. But the ozone layer did not collapse. “It has resilience,” he said.

Crooks O' The Day

And now we'll hear more about the urgent need for the various levels of governments to harden our energy infrastructure.

Here's a thought: if we push for Distributed Generation - where each house, or each neighborhood, has its own power source - then some asshole can't take down 'the grid' because 'the grid' doesn't fucking exist.

But what's the bet that we'll feel compelled to spend ourselves into oblivion defending private corporations' commercial interests?

TACOMA, Wash. — Two Puyallup men have been charged in attacks at four Pierce County power substations that left thousands in the dark on Christmas.

Matthew Greenwood, 32, and Jeremy Crahan, 40, are charged with conspiracy to damage energy facilities and possession of an unregistered firearm, according to U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, Nick Brown.

The men were arrested on Saturday following an investigation by the FBI.

The four substations that were vandalized were the Graham and Elk Plain substations, operated by Tacoma Power, and the Kapowsin and Hemlock substations, operated by Puget Sound Energy.

Power was cut to more than 14,000 customers. All of the attacks happened in the middle of the night, according to Pierce County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Darren Moss, Jr.

“After watching this stuff happen in other jurisdictions, everybody might think Graham, Pierce County might be the last place something like this would happen, but it did,” said Sgt. Moss.

According to court documents, the attacks on the substations were attempts to cover up a burglary at a local business, where Crahan drilled out a lock, and Greenwood stole from a cash register.

“It’s kind of concerning that people would shut out the power to thousands just to rob a store,” said Sgt. Moss.

The damage to the Tacoma Power substations alone is estimated to be at least $3 million. Repairing a single damaged transformer could take up to 36 months.

“You can’t really put a dollar amount on some of the damage on the individuals who had their power go out,” said U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. “People were waking up to frozen houses and feeling cold and not having electricity and heat in their homes at that time is very serious.”

The men were identified as possible suspects through cellphone records and surveillance video.

At one substation, Tacoma Power recorded images of one man and a pickup truck that appeared to be connected to the attack. A similar truck was found to be connected to the suspects, according to the Justice Department.

In addition, distinctive clothing seen in the surveillance photos was found during a search of the men’s home.

Agents also seized two unregistered short-barreled guns. One of the weapons was equipped with a makeshift silencer.

Both men will appear in U.S. District Court in Tacoma on Tuesday, where prosecutors will ask that the suspects remain detained at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac pending future hearings.

Conspiracy to attack energy facilities is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Possession of an unregistered firearm is punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Looming

On the brink

Extinction crisis puts 1 million species on the verge of disappearing
By Julia Janicki, Katy Daigle, and Sudev Kiyada

Nature is in crisis, and it’s only getting worse. As species vanish at a rate not seen in 10 million years, more than 1 million species are currently on the brink.

Humans are driving this extinction crisis through activities that take over animal habitats, pollute nature and fuel global warming. A new global deal to protect nature agreed on Dec. 19 has the potential to help, and scientists are urging the world’s nations to ensure the deal is a success.

When an animal species is lost, a whole set of characteristics disappears along with it - genes, behaviors, activities and interactions with other plants and animals that may have taken thousands or millions - even billions - of years to evolve.

Whatever role that species played within an ecosystem is lost too, whether that’s pollinating certain plants, churning nutrients in soil, fertilizing forests or keeping other animal populations in check, among other things. If that function was crucial to the health of an ecosystem, the animals’ disappearance can cause a landscape to transform.

This is the case with “foundation species” that play a key part in structuring communities, such as corals, or “keystone species” like beavers that have a big impact on their environments, relative to their numbers.

Lose too many species and the results could be catastrophic, leading an entire system to collapse.

Gone forever

In the last five centuries, hundreds of unique animals have vanished across the world, such as the flightless Dodo bird killed off from the island of Mauritius in the late 1600s.

In many cases, humans were to blame - first by fishing or hunting, as was the case with South Africa’s zebra subspecies Quagga hunted to its end in the late 19th century - and more recently through activities that pollute, disrupt or take over wild habitats.
Endlings

Before a species goes extinct, it may already be considered “functionally extinct” – with not enough individuals left to ensure the species survives. More recent extinctions have allowed humans to interact with some species’ last known individuals, known as “endlings”. When they go, that’s the end of those evolutionary lines.

“Toughie”
Rabb’s Fringe-Limbed tree frog
Toughie was the last known individual of the Rabb’s Fringe-Limbed tree frog. All but a few dozen of his species had been wiped out by chytrid fungus in the wild in Panama. And eventually, Toughie was the last. In his enclosure at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, he was calling out in vain for a mate that didn’t exist. He died in 2016.

“Martha”
Passenger pigeon
Martha’s story is a cautionary tale for conservation: in the 1850s there were still millions of passenger pigeons, but they were eventually hunted to extinction as conservation measures were taken only after the species was past the point of no return. Martha was the last individual of the passenger pigeon. She died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

“George”
Pinta Island tortoise
Lonesome George, found in 1971, was Ecuador’s last ​​Pinta Island tortoise. From the 17th century, some 200,000 individuals were hunted for their meat. Later, they struggled to compete for food after goats were brought to the island in the 1950s. Scientists tried to save the species through captive breeding before George died in 2012.

“Ben”
Thylacine
Benjamin was the world’s last known thylacine, a marsupial carnivore also known as the Tasmanian tiger. After Europeans arrived on the island, thylacine numbers quickly declined due to hunting, habitat loss and introduced disease. The animal was given protective status only two months before Benjamin died in 1936 in the Beaumaris Zoo in Tasmania.

On the brink

There are some species that could soon be reduced to their own endlings. The Northern white rhino subspecies, the second-largest land mammal after elephants, has no hope of recovery after the last male died in 2018. Only a female and her daughter are left.

The world’s smallest porpoise - Mexico’s critically endangered vaquita - is down to just 18 individuals in the wild, as populations have been ravaged by fishing nets.

These stories of endlings matter, scientists say, precisely because so many extinctions happen out of sight.

“Somewhere in the core of our humanity, we recognize these creatures, we’re touched by their story, and we feel compassion - and maybe also a moral compulsion - to help,” said Paula Ehrlich, president and CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

The Northern white rhino isn’t just a part of the world, she said. It’s a world unto itself - its own ecosystem - mowing fields through grazing, fertilizing lands where it walks, having insects land on its skin, and then with birds feeding off those insects.

“Understanding everything that an animal is and does for the world helps us understand that we, too, are a part of nature - and we need nature to survive,” Ehrlich said.

Extinction over time

The endlings mentioned above are well-known because scientists realized that these species were declining and attempted to save them. Many other species just fade away in the wild.

Scientists count 881 animal species as having gone extinct since around 1500, dating to the first records held by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) – the global scientific authority on the status of nature and wildlife. That’s an extremely conservative estimate for species extinction over the last five centuries, though, as it represents only the cases resolved with a high degree of certainty.

If we include animal species that scientists suspect might be extinct, that number shoots up to 1,473. The bar is high for declaring a species extinct – a sobering task that scientists are already reluctant to do.

“It’s hard to prove the negative, to prove you can’t find it,” said Sean O’Brien, an ecologist who heads the NatureServe nonprofit working to establish definitive data on North American species. “And it’s emotional. A botanist doesn’t want to declare it extinct because it feels like a failure.” So scientists might take longer trying to find the species before making the call.

Among terrestrial vertebrates, or land animals with a backbone, 322 species have been declared extinct since 1500. Add in the number of possibly extinct species and the tally comes to 573.

For moisture-loving amphibians, vulnerable to both pollution and drought, things are looking particularly bleak - with the extinction rate escalating over the last few decades. Only 37 species have been declared extinct with a high degree of certainty since 1500. But scientists suspect more than 100 others have disappeared over the last 30-40 years, according to a 2015 study in the journal Science Advances.

The records of last sightings increase over time, especially from the mid-19th century start of the Industrial Revolution. That shows animals have been at increasing peril, but also that our knowledge of nature has increased as we study and survey more species.

There are many notable species among those that have vanished since 1500. The dodo was last seen in 1662, within 65 years of it first being recorded. The Pinta Island tortoise was last seen in the wild in 1972.

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird was last seen in 1985 on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi and later declared extinct, along with it the ʻōʻō genus and the Mohoidae family – marking the only extinction of an entire avian family in modern times.

Some vanishings have inspired public outcry, such as the 2016 extinction declaration for the tiny Christmas Island pipistrelle bat species, last seen in 2009. It was Australia’s first recorded mammal extinction in 50 years.

Others like the Chiriqui Harlequin Frog, declared extinct in 2019 after last being seen 23 years earlier, become symbols of nature in crisis. The Panamanian frog was wiped out by the same fungus that felled Toughie’s kind.

Losing hundreds of species over 500 or so years may not seem significant when there are millions more still living on the planet. But in fact, the speed at which species are now vanishing is unprecedented in the last 10 million years.

“We are losing species now faster than they can evolve,” O’Brien said.

Mass extinctions

The number of vertebrates that have gone extinct over the last 100 years should have taken 800 - 10,000 years

Plenty of animals have gone extinct naturally or due to causes unrelated to human activity. In a healthy environment, as species die off naturally, new species evolve – and an evolutionary balance is maintained.

This turnover relies on what scientists consider a normal or background extinction rate.

But when the extinction rate jumps so high that more than 75% of the world’s species go extinct within the relatively short time frame of less than 2 million years, this is considered a mass extinction event.

That’s happened five times over the last half-billion years, which we know through studying Earth’s fossil record - with layers upon layers of sediment having buried the remains of animals over time. When a layer with a large and diverse number of animals is found, scientists can see that a mass die-off occurred.

Through other evidence in the geological record, researchers can help deduce what likely caused the die-off. For example, the Permian-Triassic extinction event some 250 million years ago – also known as the Great Dying – saw up to 96% of Earth’s species disappear. With the record showing vast lands were covered in lava, while clouds of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide caused acid rain and global warming, scientists theorize that volcanic activity likely caused the wipeout.

And with the planet’s last mass extinction about 66 million years ago, when about 76% of all life forms including dinosaurs vanished, scientists have figured out that volcanic activity had again increased global temperatures before an asteroid slammed into the planet, causing superheating followed by rapid cooling – pushing already-stressed species over the edge.

Scientists warn we have entered a sixth mass extinction. And with climate change, humans are now engineering conditions similar to those that drove past die-offs, scientists say.

Under a normal extinction rate scenario, it would have taken at least 800 years and up to 10,000 years for the high number of vertebrate extinctions that we’ve seen in the last century, according to the 2015 paper in Science Advances.

“Despite our best efforts, the extinction rate is still estimated to be 1,000 times higher than before humans entered the stage,” Ehrlich said. “At this rate, half will be gone by the end of the century.”

Unknown and still under threat

Animal species vulnerable to endangerment in the near future more than 40,000 species are threatened with extinction

As bad as it seems, scientists say the reality is likely even worse. Looking only at species extinctions doesn’t give the full picture, partly because scientists are so conservative in saying a species is gone. For example, even though Toughie was the last known individual of his kind, the IUCN lists his species still as “critically endangered, possibly extinct.”

More importantly, there is a vast reservoir of species that we have yet to discover. Scientists have identified some 1.2 million species in the world, but estimate there are about 8.7 million. That leaves roughly 7.5 million species that we think are out there but know nothing about – including whether or not they’re in trouble.

“Knowing what we do about the impact of climate change and habitat loss, it’s hard to imagine that thousands if not millions of species are not in the process of going extinct right now,” O’Brien said.

A look at the number of “threatened” species as well as population trends can offer more insight into the declining state of the world’s biodiversity.

Among terrestrial vertebrates, amphibians are in the most trouble, with over 40% of species threatened, many of them heading towards extinction. The golden toad, found in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, is the poster child of amphibian extinctions, not only because it was stunningly beautiful, but also because it was declared extinct only two decades after being described.

The IUCN uses a range of categories to describe the state of a species, as a way of identifying which are in trouble and when to help. But a species being listed as “least concern” or “near threatened” doesn’t mean its populations are stable. African lions, for example, have been listed for decades as “vulnerable,” but their numbers dropped 43% in 1993-2014, when the last population data was available. The decline of one or more populations of a species can mark the start of a trend toward extinction.

The IUCN lists ​​4,898 species of terrestrial vertebrates – birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – with declining populations as “least concern”: 3,337 birds, 287 reptiles, 819 amphibians, and 455 mammals.

Just because a species is listed as least concerned or near threatened by IUCN, doesn’t mean its populations are stable. Nearly 50% of bird species that are considered not threatened are facing population declines, so are others to some extent.

Conservation gives hope

As sobering as the situation may seem at a global scale, there are reasons for hope. The newly adopted Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December will guide global conservation efforts through the decade to 2030. Among other things, the deal envisions putting 30% of the planet’s land and sea areas under protection by decade’s end.

“It’s so overwhelming to think there are these species right on the edge,” O’Brien said. “But then the conservationists I work with remind me of how much people care.”

Between 1993 and 2020, conservation measures such as habitat restoration or captive breeding helped to prevent the extinction of up to 32 bird species and as many as 16 mammals worldwide, according to conservative estimates in a 2020 study published in the journal Conservation Letters.

Computers other technological advances – from apps that crowd-source citizen science data to programs for sequencing species’ genetic DNA – are helping scientists learn more about what’s in nature so they’re better able to help struggling species, and to understand what’s lost when they can’t.

“Science is democratizing the information for every country to know what it needs to do where,” said Ehrlich of the Wilson Foundation, which works to identify the best places in the world for protecting biodiversity and prioritizing nature. Before he died last year, Wilson himself advocated putting half the planet under conservation and estimated that would save 85% of the world’s species.

“We humbly need to do the best that we can to protect them now,” Ehrlich said, “until we understand more about the intricate web of life that sustains nature – and us, as a part of nature.”

The Rivers Are Dying

The Po is Dying

The Yangtse is dying

The Danube is dying

The Loire is dying

The Colorado is dying

The Mississippi is dying

The Amazon is dying

Along with ocean currents, rivers are the earth's vascular system.

And again - this is not the planet dying. The planet is in the process of healing itself by husbanding its resources and killing off the people who are causing the problems that are making the rivers and the oceans die.

Think it'll get better sometime soon?

Nope - think again.

There will likely be a year or two once in a while that's not so bad - prob'ly enough to let the politicians convince too many of us that everything's just peachy - but apparently, it's bound to get a lot worse a lot sooner than we thought.

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — In her 60 years of life in the Amazon, Antonia Franco dos Santos has never had much money. Food was sometimes scarce. But never in the forest, with its heavy rains and endless rivers, had she known a life without water — not until she moved to this city along the southern crest, where her reserves are now down to the last gallon and the deliveryman is nowhere to be seen.

“He’ll come,” Franco says, looking into the distance. “He will.”

It hasn’t rained in more than a month, and probably won’t for another. The community pond that Franco and her neighbors used during the rainy season has dried to a muddy puddle. A water hole they’ve dug in desperation hasn’t conserved a drop. And inside her wooden shack this Monday morning is a stack of dishes, unwashed; a pile of clothes, unwashed; and an infant great-grandchild named Samuel. He needs a washing, too.

For Franco, this makes three drought-racked years in a row, living in a landscape she never imagined: an Amazon gone dry.

“I have to hope,” she says, glancing down at her mismatched socks. “Today will be different. Enough water will come.”

For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.

About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.

More than three-quarters of the rainforest, research indicates, is showing signs of lost resilience. In fire-scorched areas of the Rio Negro floodplains, one research group noted a “drastic ecosystem shift” that has reduced jungle to savanna. In the southeastern Amazon, which has been assaulted by rapacious cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being pushed aside by species better acclimated to drier climes. In the southwestern Amazon, fast-growing bamboo is overtaking lands ravaged by fire and drought. And in the devastated transitional forests of Mato Grosso state, researchers believe a local tipping point is imminent.

⬇︎ This is a little too coincidental to be simple coincidence ⬇︎

The rainforest has never been closer to what scientists predict would be a global calamity. Because it stores an estimated 123 billion tons of carbon, the Amazon is seen as vital to forestalling catastrophic global warming. But during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, who supports its development, deforestation has risen to a 15-year high. Parts of the forest now emit more carbon than they absorb. If the rest follows, the impact will be felt all over the world.

The stakes are highest in the forest itself, where millions of people are for the first time reckoning with a hotter, smokier and drier Amazon. Strange sights are being reported: Wells that have gone dry. Streams that have vanished. The arrival of the maned wolf, a species native to South American savannas. Even a scourge familiar elsewhere in Brazil but not here: thirst.

Terrence McCoy, who covers Brazil for The Washington Post, made three visits to Rio Branco this year, following one family's story as they tried to survive an extreme drought with insufficient water. Local journalist Alexandre Cruz-Noronha photographed the city monthly from April to September during another punishing dry season.

One place in its stranglehold is the remote city of Rio Branco in Acre state, where scientists fear that the climate has already changed. Every rainy season seems to bring floods, when the rivers swell with runoff once caught by the forest. And nearly every dry season ushers in a drought, when a growing number of people are forced to choose between using dirty water or none at all.

The impact on public health is already apparent, particularly among the young. Acre state was struck by an outbreak of acute diarrhea last year that killed two children, and cases surged again this year. Smoke from rampant forest fires has so polluted Rio Branco’s air that dozens of people are sent to hospitals every dry season with respiratory illnesses.

The community, beset by another punishing drought this year, is taking extraordinary steps to survive. Each morning, the local government dispatches a fleet of tank trucks bearing water to a greater number of locations than ever before: schools, hospitals, the prison, and a swelling number of impoverished communities not connected to the municipal water line, where historic sources are running dry and daily existence is now organized around the deliveries.

They come to Franco’s enclave twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, when residents replenish their reserves and the tense wait for the next delivery begins anew.

On that Monday morning in late August, Franco hears the water truck’s arrival just after 9 o’clock. But she doesn’t move. The eight households in this pocket of the Adauto Frota slum draw water in order of their proximity to the communal tank. And Franco’s shack, which she shares with her 17-year-old granddaughter, the girl’s boyfriend and their son, is the second-farthest away.

On the best of days, Franco might get almost all her share, quieting her worries over what might befall baby Samuel — diarrhea, dehydration, something worse — if they don’t receive enough water. But this morning is hot and dry. The community has gone four days since the last delivery. She wants to believe a spirit of sharing will trump individual need, but when she finally gets the community hose, it’s late. The sun is setting. She puts the hose into her tank and steps back.

The water comes out in a trickle.

“It’s weak,” she says, anxiety in her voice.

She adjusts the hose, twisting it this way and that. But the flow is still too weak. Others have taken far more than their share. It will be hours before the tank fills, if it does at all. She looks back at her house.

The stack of dishes. The pile of clothes. And, most pressingly, Samuel.

“We just have to hope,” she says.

‘THE TIPPING POINT IS HERE’

In the 1970s, Brazilian researcher Enéas Salati upended much of what scientists thought they knew about the Amazon. Until then, it was believed that the forest’s abundant rain was a function of climate. But by studying oxygen isotopes in rainwater throughout the Amazon, Salati found that about half of the precipitation was recycled. There had been a hidden source of water in the Amazon all along, Salati discovered: the forest itself.

Water cycles through the biome, to be used and reused. The trees, with deep root systems, drink up rainwater, then secrete the moisture into the atmosphere. Easterly winds from the Atlantic then carry it farther inland, where it forms into rain and the process repeats. A single water molecule can be recycled up to six times.

“An almost unique precipitation and water-recycling regime,” Salati called it.

The Amazon forest is an ecosystem bound together by wind and rain.

Trees drink up the rainfall and release it back into the atmosphere, in a recycling process known as evapotranspiration.

Winds take this airborne moisture deeper inland, where it forms into rainfall again — and then again.

During the dry season, the forest is particularly dependent on itself to survive. Deep roots pump up moisture stored in the soil, which is then released by pores in the trees’ leaves.

But deforestation corrodes the system. Fewer trees mean less evapotranspiration. Less rain. And less moisture carried deeper into the forest.

A drier, warmer forest is more vulnerable to fire and drought. Species better suited to drier conditions gain greater dominance. Global warming accelerates the process.

The rainforest is no longer able to maintain the hydraulic system on which it depends. The damage accelerates and spreads. Local tipping points are breached, putting more forest in danger.

This understanding became the foundation for a new field of study, much of which would focus on the same urgent questions. If the hydraulic cycle that sustains the Amazon is dependent on its flora, what happens when the vegetation is cut down? How much deforestation can the system withstand? Is there a point of no return, and if so, where is it?

One influential study put the trigger at 40 percent deforestation. But then scientists added the variables of climate change and fire — particularly destructive in a forest that doesn’t burn naturally — and argued that it would take much less. The forest’s vastness, they said, belied its critical vulnerability.

“We stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here,” Brazilian climatologist Carlos Nobre and American ecologist Thomas Lovejoy wrote in Science Advances in 2019. “It is now.”

The region most likely to fall first is the southeast, where dry-season temperatures in the past four decades have risen an average of 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) and rainfall has dropped by a quarter. Its collapse could have devastating consequences, depriving the western forests of moisture and dragging other parts of the ecosystem down with it.

“Cascading tipping events” is how one research team this year described it.

Rio Branco, the Acre state capital, is particularly vulnerable to this sequence. Distant from the Atlantic, dependent on recycled rain, it also sits at the western edge of the arc of deforestation, where three-fourths of the Brazilian Amazon’s losses are concentrated. Over the past four decades in Acre, the mean monthly precipitation from June through August — the height of the dry season — has dropped by nearly a third, Utrecht University researcher Arie Staal found. In Rio Branco, it has plunged to a deeper low, from 2.2 inches to 1.4 inches.

“No other region is more affected by the arc of deforestation than the southwest,” climate scientist Bernardo Flores said. “We see it already happening: Deforestation is depriving the forest of rain.”

The effect is local as well. When Rio Branco knocked down much of its forest, it killed about 200 sources of water that fed the city’s central artery, the Acre River. In the coming decades, if trends continue, the river will dip so low that “not even sewer runoff will go down it,” said Claudemir Mesquita, a former state environmental official. “It’s an atomic bomb, and it’s armed.”

This, now, is the dry season in Rio Branco: Months of overcast skies — not from clouds, but the smoke of forest fires. Days so hot that farmhands are sent home. The river ebbing to historic lows. And armadas of water delivery trucks, called “pipa,” taking over the roads.

Commanding the wheel of one is a thin man with thick, shaggy hair. Over the past two decades, as droughts have grown more frequent and people started complaining of water shortages, he has become one of Rio Branco’s most ubiquitous figures.

His name is Fredy Salles. And he’s the water man.

SERVING THE THIRSTY

Every weekday morning at dawn, he drives to the edge of town, where the paved roads give way to dirt. The open-air compound looks just like everything around it: dry and desolate. But this is a “source,” as everyone here calls it, where pipa drivers pump up fresh water from an underground aquifer that, for now, still runs deep and cool.

As the rising sun breaks through the smoky haze, Salles waits for his 4,200-gallon tank to fill, his fingers thrumming the steering wheel.

“Let’s go,” he says with a sigh.

The height of the dry season is here, and Salles, who has delivered water in Rio Branco longer than just about anyone, knows it’s up to people like him to keep the city running. He drives to schools so the kids will have water to drink. He hurries to the prison to avert a riot. He fuels the children’s hospital and the maternity ward. He ventures into gang-controlled neighborhoods where the state is all but absent — except for organizing his water deliveries.

His tank filled and engine clanging, Salles makes the sign of the cross and pulls out into a city that every year feels more different from the one he once knew. He grew up in a community of rubber tappers, where the forest was lush and the water so plentiful that he couldn’t have dreamed of it drying up. The images he sees now outside his window — roadside infernos, barren fields where the city couldn’t find water, the forest all gone — would have seemed so cartoonishly apocalyptic he would have laughed. Even this job seemed odd when he took it in 2000. But the work has since come to define him, give him purpose.

Salles is a pipa driver, here to serve the thirsty.

And here comes one more, an elderly woman on dialysis, limping up to her empty water drum as he puts in a thick hose to fill it. “Every year it’s worse and worse,” Marli da Silva Araújo said. “It’s a mercy they give us water.”

And 15-year-old Viviane Batista da Silva, who has never known anything but dry-season droughts and water rationing. “Hasn’t it always been this way?” she asks.

And the young mother of four who watches as Salles fills a drum for her neighbors. “It’s hard to beg for water,” says Luciana Costa do Nascimento, 31. Her white blouse is dotted with stains she can’t remove. “But we have no water.”

Salles first saw such need just after the drought of 2010. He’d gone to a community he didn’t know to deliver water, and was stunned to find children dirty, families with nothing to drink, everyone hungry. In the Amazon, extreme poverty was nothing new, but rarely had it seemed so raw. Salles began to see these people as the hidden victims of deforestation. They had depended on the forest — fishing from its streams, drinking from its pools — and were destitute without it.

He encounters such people everywhere these days, on deliveries that take him deeper into the countryside, even to Indigenous lands, where in one arid stretch nearly 90 miles from Rio Branco, a leader of the Apurinã people waits for his water to come.

Geraldo Apurinã, 62, looks out at the sun-wilted territory that little resembles the one in which he grew up. In front of his wooden house now runs a federal highway that changed everything here, even lending its name to the reserve: Apurinã Indigenous Territory kilometer 124, BR-317.

Highway BR-317, built in 1956, brought the loggers who razed the forest. And the ranchers who dammed the creeks to capture water for their cattle, cutting off the territory’s main source. The game the Apurinã had hunted soon disappeared, and the Indigenous leader saw his own people, with little food and water, become agents of the forest’s destruction, tearing it down to become cattle ranchers themselves. Now the highway brings in the natural consequence of these losses: water deliveries.

The flow from the water truck gushes into his drum. Apurinã looks out upon all that the highway has given him. His grandchildren play on smartphones. His house is wooden and strong. Nearby is a small store where he can buy soda and processed snacks.

“But none of this makes up for what we lost,” Apurinã says.

His culture is dying. Almost no one here speaks the native language anymore. Even the water has abandoned this place, and increasingly Apurinã feels as if it’s time he did the same. The deliveries are, to him, a final indignity. He’s been reduced to dependency.

His drum is topped off. The water truck starts up again. And his house is left behind, lost in a cloud of dust coming in off the dirt highway.

There isn’t a cloud in the sky. Just smoke and sun.

‘A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE’

For Franco, the best moment of the week is here. It’s 6:30 on the morning after the water delivery. Humming to herself, she puts some water to boil and makes tea and coffee — two luxuries she couldn’t have managed the day before — and glances at the dirty clothes and dishes. The thought of being able to finally clean what needs cleaning brings her such joy that she’s almost able to forget that they received far less water than she’d hoped.

“Today, everything is a blessing,” she says, bending over to heft a basket of laundry.

Franco came here from the river town of Pauini in Amazonas state, 200 miles to the north, far from the arc of deforestation and accessible only by boat. She’d lived her entire life along the bends of the Purus River, leaving only when her son and daughter asked her to come down to Rio Branco, where they lived for work. Her son said he’d built her a small shack next to his house. Wanting the family to be together, she arrived in late 2019 with her granddaughter Sara, in the middle of the rainy season.

“A good place to live,” she remembers thinking.

The pond was overflowing with water. The ground was soggy and fertile. Rain buckets were full. She moved into the shack, feeling light and unconcerned, unaware that the pond would soon dry out, the ground would harden and crack, and the buckets would go weeks without another drop. In that first drought, the city wasn’t yet running its deliveries to the community, so Franco set out to beg for water. She went from house to house, bucket in hand, and when one neighbor finally said, “Ma’am, you can have all the water you need,” she thanked God for being so good to her.

Now four people live in her shack, and the problem seems so much bigger. When Sara, who suffers from a learning disability, said last year that her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant, Franco was seized with worry. She understood that the weight of protecting the child would fall on her. But the question of how she would do that, in a community without water, was one she couldn’t answer. She spent months fretting over diseases the baby might catch — fears that every day, including on this one, feel on the verge of being realized.

The delivered water is about gone, used up on laundry. But chores remain.

Standing outside her shack, Franco looks down at what remains of the pond, brown and fetid, more mud than water. Another delivery isn’t due for two more days. There’s no other choice.

She picks up some soap and then lifts the basket of dirty dishes. Balancing it atop her head, she heads down to the diminished pond. She steps out onto a wooden plank at the water’s edge and, taking care to skim the only the least-murky bit from the top, starts to pour it onto the dishes, sun searing her back.

Sometimes, in moments like this, she lets her mind take her back to Amazonas, to her childhood living in her grandfather’s village, where there was only forest, rivers and rain. Whatever they put into the ground sprouted: potatoes, tomatoes, onions, pineapple. She’d do anything to go back there, when “we had so much.” But instead she’s here, cleaning dirty dishes with dirty water, without enough money to pay for transportation back to the river town she curses herself for leaving.

She finishes the chore. She puts the dishes back into the basket. Walking up to her shack, she sees the clean garments hanging on the line. The laundry is dry and nearly immaculate — just a few faint stains.

She pulls down the sheets and brings one up to her face. She breathes in the clean smell as deeply as she can, and slowly exhales. She smiles. “Smells so good,” she says, and then returns to the darkness of her shack, to check on Samuel.

The only thing left to do is to wait for more water.

THE CLIMATE REFUGEES OF THE AMAZON

For many scientists, the most pressing question is no longer whether the Amazon is reaching a tipping point, but what will come after. Some say the biome that rises from the fires will be a degraded, open-canopy forest. Others say it will remain closed, but deformed. But perhaps the most likely outcome is far more drastic — the destroyed forest giving way to an expansive grassland.

Research suggests that the savannization of the Amazon, coupled with global warming, would subject millions in the region to potentially deadly heat. Even if carbon emissions are reduced, 6 million Brazilians could face that risk. But if emissions continue on their current trajectory, by the turn of the century about a third of the Brazilian Amazon’s population — 11 million people — will face temperatures that pose “extreme risk to human health,” researchers reported last year in the scientific journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The next century could see an exodus from the Amazon, an outflow that would reconfigure the Americas.

As Salles drives past a roadside inferno early one morning, that prospect seems even closer. Rio Branco already feels on the brink of collapse. The afternoon before, during a 14-hour shift, he received an urgent message: The prison was out of water. He refilled its tanks in time, but found himself worrying. He could have blown a tire. Or been slowed by an accident. Any number of unforeseen events can delay the water’s arrival and ignite a riot.

The water delivery system has come to seem increasingly precarious, dependent on everything going right. He doesn’t know how long it can last, or when the people here will become so fed up — exhausted by the heat and water shortages — that they decide to leave.

He passes a second fire. Flames envelope a distant field.

Salles doesn’t see how this cycle of fire, deforestation and drought will ever break. Most everyone he speaks with believes that deforestation is depleting the water and that those who are suffering the most are the poor. And yet, it’s precisely this poverty that’s being used to justify more devastation. The politicians who say developing the Amazon will bring economic prosperity are the ones here who get votes. In October’s presidential election, Bolsonaro lost the contest, but won an overwhelming share of the vote in the arc of deforestation.

Even Salles has voted for such candidates. Not because he didn’t fear the environmental consequences of their vision, but because the daily plight of the poor seemed more urgent. Rio Branco has the smallest economy among Brazilian state capitals. People need work, even if the jobs they take lead to more destruction.

He passes a third fire, so deep in the fields that Salles knows authorities will simply let it burn.

Out there, beyond the rising smoke, is his next stop: Franco’s community. To Salles, she’s the quiet woman who lives at the back of the enclave. To Franco, however, the sight of his water truck is deliverance, proof that God is good.

“Today will be better,” Franco says inside her shack. “Today there will be more water.”

The difficult math has not changed. One 2,600-gallon tank. Eight homes to fill. Franco, too afraid to confront her neighbors in an area dominated by gangs, is still seventh in line. But she thinks she’ll have to get more this time. Finally, the dishes will get the cleaning they need.

The community tank is filled. Each of the six homes before hers takes its fill. Then her household is finally up next in line. It’s again late in the day.

Yelling with glee, she runs down to the community hose, gurgling with fresh water. Moving quickly, she fits it to another hose, and then another, like a string of extension cords connecting to a faraway plug. Then she places the end of the final hose into her water drum and, breathing out slowly, takes a step back, hoping, hoping.

“Oh, my God,” she says.

“It’s weak again.”

She looks at her shack, where Samuel is asleep. Then she glances down at the pond, where she knows she’ll soon have to return, and which, within the month, will be so dry she’ll no longer have even its soupy waters as a last resort.

She looks back at the hose.

“Just a dribble,” she says.

She sits down on the bare ground, pulls her knees beneath her chin and, as night descends, listens to water trickle into an empty drum.

Because We Don't Pay Attention

In our defense, pay attention to what exactly?

And if we do, how do we know what we're seeing?

How do we know Adam Conover (eg) isn't pulling our leg too?

See where all that Radical Skepticism gets us?

And that's pretty much the point. The Daddy State needs us to be so uncertain that we'll glom onto anything that sounds like it carries real authority.

(get it - authority - authoritarian? Yeah OK never mind)

Adam Conover - 501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(4) and how the behavior of "good billionaires" is just as shitty as all the other power-hungry assholes - they're just a lot better at PR.

BTW - in the last 50 years, animal populations have decreased by almost 70%, while biodiversity in the Caribbean & Latin American Region is down 94%.

⚠️

-94%

🫣

Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals

Huge scale of human-driven loss of species demands urgent action, say world’s leading scientists

Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, according to a leading scientific assessment, as humans continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.

From the open ocean to tropical rainforests, the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is in freefall, declining on average by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2018, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet Report. Two years ago, the figure stood at 68%, four years ago, it was at 60%.

Many scientists believe we are living through the sixth mass extinction – the largest loss of life on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs – and that it is being driven by humans. The report’s 89 authors are urging world leaders to reach an ambitious agreement at the Cop15 biodiversity summit in Canada this December and to slash carbon emissions to limit global heating to below 1.5C this decade to halt the rampant destruction of nature.

The Living Planet Index combines global analysis of 32,000 populations of 5,230 animal species to measure changes in the abundance of wildlife across continents and taxa, producing a graph akin to a stock index of life on Earth.

Latin America and the Caribbean region – including the Amazon – has seen the steepest decline in average wildlife population size, with a 94% drop in 48 years. Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF-UK, said: “This report tells us that the worst declines are in the Latin America region, home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon. Deforestation rates there are accelerating, stripping this unique ecosystem not just of trees but of the wildlife that depends on them and of the Amazon’s ability to act as one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change.”

Africa had the second largest fall at 66%, followed by Asia and the Pacific with 55% and North America at 20%. Europe and Central Asia experienced an 18% fall. The total loss is akin to the human population of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Oceania and China disappearing, according to the report.

“Despite the science, the catastrophic projections, the impassioned speeches and promises, the burning forests, submerged countries, record temperatures and displaced millions, world leaders continue to sit back and watch our world burn in front of our eyes,” said Steele. “The climate and nature crises, their fates entwined, are not some faraway threat our grandchildren will solve with still-to-be-discovered technology.”

She added: “We need our new prime minister to show the UK is serious about helping people, nature and the economy to thrive, by ensuring every promise for our world is kept. Falling short will be neither forgotten nor forgiven.”

Leading nature charities have accused Liz Truss of putting the economy before nature protection and the environment, and are concerned rare animals and plants could lose their protections when her promise of a “bonfire” of EU red tape happens later this year.

The report points out that not all countries have the same starting points with nature decline and that the UK has only 50% of its biodiversity richness compared with historical levels, according to the biodiversity intactness index, making it one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

Land use change is still the most important driver of biodiversity loss across the planet, according to the report. Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF-UK, said: “At a global level, primarily the declines we are seeing are driven by the loss and fragmentation of habitat driven by the global agricultural system and its expansion into intact habitat converting it to produce food.”

The researchers underscore the increased difficulty animals are having moving through terrestrial landscapes as they are blocked by infrastructure and farmland. Only 37% of rivers longer than 1,000km (600 miles) remain free-flowing along their entire length, while just 10% of the world’s protected areas on land are connected.

Future declines are not inevitable, say the authors, who pinpoint the Himalayas, south-east Asia, the east coast of Australia, the Albertine Rift and Eastern Arc mountains in eastern Africa, and the Amazon basin among priority areas.

The IUCN is also developing a standard to measure the conservation potential of an animal, known as its green status, which will allow researchers to plot a path to recovery for some of the one million species threatened with extinction on Earth. The pink pigeon, burrowing bettong and Sumatran rhino were highlighted as species with good conservation potential in a study last year.

Robin Freeman, head of the indicators and assessments unit at ZSL, said it was clear that humanity is eroding the very foundations of life, and urgent action is needed. “In order to see any bending of the curve of biodiversity loss … it’s not just about conservation it’s about changing production and consumption – and the only way that we are going to be able to legislate or call for that is to have these clear measurable targets that ask for recovery of abundance, reduction of extinction risk and the ceasing of extinctions at Cop15 in December.”