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The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection
The “Sixth Extinction” Adds Urgency to Habitat and Climate Protection
It’s now unequivocal: the sixth great spasm of species extinctions has begun. We – homo sapiens – are its cause. And only we can slow it down.
Over the last century, the average rate of loss of vertebrate species — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – has been up to 100 times higher than the background extinction rate, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science Advances.
In order to help settle the question of whether a sixth extinction episode has indeed begun, the scientific team chose assumptions that would tend to minimize evidence that it has. As a result, their calculations almost certainly underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis under way.
“[W]e can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way – the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history,” the researchers write.
The study team included scientists from Princeton, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Florida.
The last episode of mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and about half of all species living on Earth at the time were wiped out.
A huge crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula dated to the time of this event suggests an extraterrestrial impact as a leading cause.
But, in a first, the current mass extinction is driven by human activities – deforestation, dam-building, over-harvesting, wetland-draining, pollution and the myriad other ways we destroy the lives and homes of the rich diversity of animals with which we share the planet.
And this will not end in some Darwinian-style victory for we humans.
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Sustainability Metrics, Growth Limits, and Philanthropy
Sustainability Metrics, Growth Limits, and Philanthropy
As the metrics of sustainability become ever more robust and sophisticated, it is ever more apparent to many of us who study those metrics that industrial civilization, as currently configured, is unsustainable.
Ecological footprint analysis tells us that we are presently using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources annually. We are able to do this only by drawing down renewable resources at a rate that exceeds their ability to regenerate; in other words, by stealing from the future.
Planetary Boundaries analysts have identified nine crucial parameters that define a safe operating space for humanity within the global ecosystem. We are currently operating outside that safety zone with regard to four of the boundaries. Exceeding just one boundary far enough, long enough, imperils both human society and the ecosystem on which it necessarily depends.
The most widely discussed of those boundaries is the planetary carbon budget. As we all know only too well, the CO2 content of the atmosphere now exceeds 400 parts per million—up from the pre-industrial level of 280ppm—and we appear to be well on our way to 450, 550, or even 650ppm, while climate scientists have determined that 350 ppm is the safe limit.
Those numbers, plus extinction rates, rates of ocean acidification, rates of topsoil erosion, and rates of deforestation, are the metrics of sustainability that tend to be most frequently discussed by environmentalists, and the alarming numbers being reported for these indices are certainly sufficient to support my opening assertion that current industrial society is unsustainable. However there are two other important metrics that have fallen out of fashion, largely because many people assume they measure society’s health rather than its vulnerability. One is human population growth. We all love humanity, but how much of it can the Earth support? World population stands at about 7.3 billion, and is on course to reach between 9 and 11 billion later this century. Yet a growing human population makes all those previously mentioned ecological perils—including climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and soil degradation—harder to address.
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Seeing Peru’s forests through the trees – Features – Al Jazeera English
Seeing Peru’s forests through the trees – Features – Al Jazeera English.
Puerto Maldonado, Peru – In an Amazonian timber yard bordering Bolivia and Brazil, Nelson Kroll names stacks of rough-hewn hardwoods, pointing out shihuahuaco and pumaquiro species freshly felled from select tracts of the Madreacre logging concession.
“In this campaign we’ve cut 39,000 cubic metres of round timber, which is about one tree every two hectares,” Kroll, head of the sustainable tree farm, told Al Jazeera.
But lining the floors of European and American households isn’t the private-public partnership’s only source of income. Madreacre earns up to $200,000 a year in carbon credits through emissions captured by its forest. The company gets paid to leave trees in the ground.
The concession is one of more than 40 Peruvian national projects involved in the UN initiative called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD+. Set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2005, the mechanism aims to cut emissions from deforestation in developing countries and promote sustainable forest management.
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