68% Of Animals Are Gone - Yet Conservation Can Work. Here’s How

We are all familiar with the climate change problem that our world is facing. But almost as equally as concerning - our world is currently undergoing a dramatic and rapid loss of biodiversity.

Every two years, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) releases the Living Planet Report. This report tracks over 4,000 types of vertebrates - mammals, fish, amphibians, and birds - revealing trends in biodiversity. This year’s report showed concerning trends. 68% of vertebrate population has been lost in the last 50 years.

But the good news is that we humans can change this trend. Conservation efforts have been shown to work. The key is understanding the problem and being committed to the solution.

Understanding the Problem

The largest contributor to biodiversity loss? Land use. Food production uses an enormous amount of land, and increasingly, forests and grasslands are being converted to farmland. Other major causes are climate change, over-exploitation of populations, pollution, and invasive species.

There are not many places in the world that are not touched by human food consumption. 50% of habitable land in the world is being used for food production, whether for grazing or farming. Currently, 3/4 of land and 40% of the oceans have been damaged by human activity.

As the world population grows, how can we feed more people on less land?

The World Resources Institute outlined 21 steps in which we can do precisely this. This includes everything from assuring bio-energy and food do not compete for land, increasing the productivity of farms, and improving soil and water management.

Reworking Our Food System

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) published a study in Nature, a part of the larger WWF’s Living Planet Report. They analyzed a range of models and scenarios to see how to halt biodiversity loss.

Part of this is the transformation of our food system.

A large part of this is food waste. Up to 40% of food in the United States is never eaten. People throw away food that is perfectly edible because it looks imperfect, is beyond its best buy date, or leftovers. Some food loss occurs in the supply chain before food even reaches supermarkets. Decomposing food creates methane, a greenhouse gas. All of that food also needs land to be produced. It means we aren’t efficiently using our agricultural system.

This leads to the first part of the solution - a more sustainable food system. At home this would look like storing food better, using parts of the vegetables you would normally throw away (like broccoli stems), and composting. Eating less meat also helps, as meat production uses 83% of farmland, but only provides 18% of calories. The choice of meat also makes a difference - with fish and chicken having a smaller carbon-footprint than meats like beef and lamb. The best option? Mussels, clams, and oysters, which have the smallest environmental impact.

A Bold Plan of Conservation

Transforming the food system is not enough. The IIASA states that the second part of the plan is to rapidly increase our conservation and restoration. This means that 40% of global land become protected areas.

People often feel hopeless in the face of the biodiversity crisis. The scope of the problem seems too large. But it’s good to realize that conservation can work.

“We usually hear bad stories about the biodiversity crisis and there is no doubt that we are facing an unprecedented loss in biodiversity through human activity. The loss of entire species can be stopped if there is sufficient will to do so,” says Professor Phil McGowan of Newcastle University, who leads a Species Survival Commission task force for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Since 1993, at least 28 bird and mammal species have been saved from extinction because of conservation efforts. This includes the wild Mongolian Przewalski's horse, the Puerto Rican Amazon parrot, and the Iberian Lynx. Conservation efforts included legislation, reintroduction into the wild from in-captivity populations, and control of invasive species.

Another study out of the University of Queensland shows that protected areas can greatly help species that are on the edge. Professor James Watson, one of the study authors, says, “What our research has clearly shown is that protected areas, when well-funded and well-placed, are incredibly effective. In fact, 80 per cent of mammal species we monitored in these protected areas have at least doubled their coverage in protected areas over the last 50 years.”

Together, conservation and restoration must occur in tandem with an overhaul of the food system. If we only consider conservation and restoration, many species were still lost, and food prices may greatly increase.

Together, these efforts are ambitious. However, we’ve been shown that conservation can work. If enough people take the problem seriously and do something, the tide of biodiversity loss can hopefully be turned.