The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2024 critically assessed that the fastest declines have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean – a concerning 95% decline – followed by Africa at 76%, and Asia and the Pacific at 60% respectively
By Salam Rajesh
Biodiversity sustains human life and underpins human societies, yet, every indicator that tracks the state of nature on a global scale shows considerable decline, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s Living Planet Report 2024: A System in Peril.
The report paints a dismal picture of the natural world. Over the past 50 years, that is, between 1970 and 2020, the report says that the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73%, as measured by the Living Planet Index (LPI). This assessment is based on near 35,000 population trends and 5,495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. As per the WWF assessment, freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest declines, falling by 85%, followed by terrestrial at 69% and marine populations at 56%.
The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2024 critically assessed that the fastest declines have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean – a concerning 95% decline – followed by Africa at 76%, and Asia and the Pacific at 60% respectively.
It was observed that declines have been less dramatic in Europe and in Central Asia at 35%, and in North America at 39%, whereas this reflected the fact that large-scale impacts on nature were already apparent before 1970 in these regions, the report stated.
The WWF report noted that food production is one of the leading drivers of nature’s decline, where food production uses up to 40% of all habitable land and is the leading cause of habitat loss, accounting for 70% of water use and is responsible for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. The hidden costs of ill health and environmental degradation in the current food system amounts up to 10 to 15 trillion US Dollar annually, representing 12% of the global GDP during 2020, the report stated.
Habitat degradation and loss, driven primarily by the human food system, is the most reported threat in each region, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease. Other threats include climate change (most cited in Latin America and the Caribbean) and pollution (particularly in North America, Asia and the Pacific). Some populations, however, have stabilized or increased due to conservation efforts and species reintroductions, the report said.
The Red List Index, an indicator of trends in the extinction risk of groups of species, also provides information about the changing state of nature. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species assesses the likelihood that a species will go extinct across all its populations, based on past, current and projected future trends.
Spelling out few fears for the blue planet, the WWF report stressed that in the biosphere, the mass die-off of coral reefs would destroy fisheries and storm protection for hundreds of millions of people living on the coasts, while the Amazon rainforest tipping point would release tons of carbon into the atmosphere and disrupt weather patterns around the globe.
On a similar note, in ocean circulation, the collapse of the sub-polar gyre, a circular current south of Greenland, would dramatically change weather patterns in Europe and in North America, while in the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the planet), the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would unleash many meters of sea level rise, and the large-scale thawing of permafrost would trigger vast emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, the report warned of the eminent dangers for the planet as a whole in future times.
In a case study of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil where researchers assessed around 2000 tree species and about 800 animal species, they found that when the forest loses populations of large fruit-eating animals (tapirs, toucans, tamarins, deer) due to hunting and illegal trade, the forest loses the seed dispersal function for large-seeded trees that these animals provide, and subsequently the composition of tropical tree species changes.
Since the large-seeded trees are predominantly larger hardwood trees which store more carbon, the forest loses carbon storage capacity as it becomes dominated by smaller, softwood trees. This phenomenon has the potential to cause carbon storage losses of 2 to 12% across forests in Africa, Latin America and Asia, thus reducing the tropical forest carbon storage capacity in the face of climate change, the WWF report asserted.
In the face of these critical assessments, María Susana, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia, and the President of COP16 at Cali, Colombia (October, 2024), stressed that maintaining healthy and diverse species populations is essential for ensuring the long-term health and resilience of ecosystems and sustaining nature’s contributions to people.
WWF International’s Director General, Kirsten Schuijt opined that once ecosystems are damaged and degraded they can become more vulnerable to tipping points. That is when ‘pressures such as habitat loss, land-use change, overharvesting or climate change push ecosystems beyond a critical threshold, resulting in substantial and potentially irreversible change’.
National commitments and actions on the ground fall far short of what is needed to meet the targets for 2030, and avoid the tipping points that would make achieving these goals impossible, the report warned. Over half of the SDG targets for 2030 would be missed, with 30% of them stalled or getting worse from the 2015 baseline, the report observed.
The positive financial flows for nature-based solutions are a paltry 200 billion US Dollar. By redirecting just 7.7% of the negative finance flows, the world community could meet the funding gap for nature-based solutions and deliver nature, climate and human well-being benefits, says the WWF report.
While global climate finance for the energy sector approached 1.3 trillion US Dollar during 2021-2022, the need is a staggering 9 trillion US Dollar annually for mitigation and adaptation measures up to 2030, the report noted. Similarly, the transition to a sustainable food system require a huge increase in spending to 390 to 455 billion US Dollar annually from public and private sources, still less than what governments spend each year on environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies, the report pointed out.
While critically examining that the national biodiversity strategies and action plans are inadequate and lack financial and institutional support, the WWF report univocally cited that failures in national climate commitments would lead to an average global temperature increase of almost 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, inevitably triggering multiple catastrophic tipping points.
The planet is reaching the points of no return and irreversibly affecting its life-support systems, the report warned, while stressing that the global community is seeing the effects of deforestation and the transformation of natural ecosystems, intensive land use and climate change. The world is witnessing the mass bleaching of coral reefs, the loss of tropical forests, the collapse of polar ice caps and serious changes to the water cycle, the foundation of life on the planet, it stated.