South Africa has ambitious plans to protect biodiversity
The average number of monitored wildlife species populations has shrunk by 73% over the past 50 years, according to the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures the state of biodiversity globally.
This is based on almost 35 000 population trends and 5 495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest declines, plunging by 85%, followed by terrestrial (69%) and marine populations (56%).
“Nature is being lost — with huge implications for us all,” warned the latest edition of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF’s) biennial flagship publication, the Living Planet Report, produced with the Zoological Society of London. “Biodiversity sustains human life and underpins our societies. Yet every indicator that tracks the state of nature on a global scale shows a decline.”
The fastest declines — 95% — have been witnessed in Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by Africa (76%), then Asia and the Pacific (60%).
Declines have been less dramatic in Europe and Central Asia (35%) and North America (39%) but this “reflects the fact that large-scale impacts on nature were already apparent before 1970 in these regions”. Some populations have stabilised or increased, thanks to conservation efforts and species reintroductions.
Habitat degradation and loss, driven primarily by humanity’s food system, is the biggest culprit, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease, the report said. Other threats include climate change, which is most cited in Latin America and the Caribbean, and pollution, especially in North America, Asia and the Pacific.
Africa is unique as a region and home to significant numbers of large mammals and is rich in biodiversity. The LPI for Africa shows a decline of 76%, equivalent to 2.8% per year.
“The continent’s biodiversity provides essential resources for many rural populations, as well as for the rest of Africa and globally,” the report said. “Overexploitation is more commonly reported as a threat to LPI populations in Africa than other regions and trends in populations that are used by people show greater declines than in other regions. This highlights the urgent need to protect these vital resources.”
Stable populations over the long-term provide resilience against disturbances like disease and extreme weather events. A decline in populations, as shown in the global LPI, “decreases resilience and threatens the functioning of the ecosystem”.
This, in turn, undermines the benefits that ecosystems provide to people — from food, clean water and carbon storage for a stable climate to the broader contributions that nature makes to cultural, social and spiritual well-being.
The index and similar indicators show that “nature is disappearing at an alarming rate”. While some changes may be small and gradual, their cumulative effects can trigger a larger, faster change. When these reach a threshold, the change becomes self-perpetuating, resulting in “substantial, often abrupt and potentially irreversible change”.
This is called a tipping point. In the natural world, several tipping points are “highly likely” if current trends are left to continue, with potentially catastrophic consequences. These include global tipping points that pose threats to humanity and most species, and would damage Earth’s life-support systems and “destabilise societies everywhere”.
There are early warning signs that several global tipping points are “fast approaching”, the report warned. These include the mass die-off of coral reefs that would destroy fisheries and storm protection for hundreds of millions of people living on the coasts while the Amazon rainforest tipping point would release tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and disrupt weather patterns around the globe.
The world’s nations have set global goals for a thriving, sustainable future, including halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity), capping global temperature rise to 1.5ºC (Paris Agreement), and eradicating poverty and ensuring human well-being (sustainable development goals — SDGs).
Yet, the world is falling far short of what’s needed to meet the 2030 targets, the report said. “Over half the SDG targets for 2030 will be missed, with 30% of them stalled or getting worse from the 2015 baseline.”
National climate commitments would lead to an average global temperature increase of almost 3°C by the end of the century, “inevitably triggering multiple catastrophic tipping points”. National biodiversity strategies and action plans are inadequate and lack financial and institutional support.
“Approaching climate, biodiversity and development goals in isolation raises the risk of conflicts between different objectives – for example, between using land for food production, biodiversity conservation or renewable energy. With a coordinated, inclusive approach, however, many conflicts can be avoided and trade-offs minimised and managed.”
To maintain a living planet where people and nature thrive, “we need action that meets the scale of the challenge. We need more, and more effective, conservation efforts, while also systematically addressing the major drivers of nature loss. That will require nothing less than a transformation of our food, energy and finance systems.
Morné du Plessis, the chief executive of WWF South Africa, speaking at the report’s launch, said: “We all have to come together and do something that’s radically different,” said. “The statistics are simply telling us that we cannot just keep drawing, we’ve got to put something back.
“What happens in the next five years is that all of those agreements — the SDGS, climate goals and nature goals — converge. That’s the time when we need to be able to look back and say that we’ve moved faster than we ever have before because we have to. We live in a very, very fragile environment.”
Locally, there are inspiring examples of institutions and initiatives that are relevant for South Africa. “A pertinent example of the level of ambition that is required is SANParks Vision 2040, which reimagines the future of conservation on a much greater scale and in a more inclusive manner through the concept of mega living landscapes.”
These are large, interconnected areas of land that encompass protected areas, private and communal land and a variety of compatible land uses. More momentum and more of this approach is needed to succeed in halting further biodiversity loss.
“Such approaches are not only more inclusive of society, but are also much more cost-effective to manage, enabling conservation efforts to be scaled to new levels,” it said.
Referring to the 30×30 targets, Du Plessis added: “We have to transform the way in which we do conservation or interpret conservation. It’s going to take a very different way of going about these things because most countries are sitting somewhere between 10% to 16% [of formally protected areas].
“Depending on how strict we are on ourselves, we sit somewhere between 12% and 15% so we have to double what is currently formally protected. Then, on top of that 30%, we have to restore 30% degraded land in order to get some of these pop rivets back into the aeroplane wing that we’ve been taking out.”
A lot needs to be done, he said. “Among these is to scale up and expand the properly funded systems of protected areas. We have to massively boost our efforts outside of the current formal protected areas. We’ve got to find many creative ways, including through the draft biodiversity economy strategy … that incorporate nature-based solutions to mitigate climate and to stem biodiversity loss.”
He emphasised that people are not an afterthought. “For all of these recommendations and activities to endure, all solutions will have to be inclusive, just, equitable and grounded in human rights.
“Now, that’s not just simple speak. This is some of the most difficult stuff for us to achieve but WWF and other environmental organisations are determined that people and nature together will thrive.”
Deon Nel, the head of environmental programmes at WWF South Africa, said that what happens over the next five years will be crucial for the future of life on Earth.
“We have the power — and opportunity — to change this trajectory. In December 2022, South Africa, along with 195 other countries, signed a global plan to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity and set nature on a path to recovery by 2030. This requires us to think, act, collaborate and marshal resources at exponentially different scales. Incremental gains will not be enough. Institutions will need to reinvent themselves to rise to this challenge.”
A critique of the Living Planet Index published earlier this year by academics found that it is not a reliable measure of population changes and “suffers from several mathematical and statistical issues”, leading to a bias towards an apparent decrease even for balanced populations.
“It would be naïve to assume that the pressure on vertebrate populations started in the 1970s — many vertebrate populations were severely exploited already in the 19th century and the first half of the last century, and they recovered only in the last few decades due to increasing global awareness of environmental issues and socioeconomic changes across the world.”
The current phase of the Anthropocene is thus characterised “by more complex changes than the simple disappearance of vertebrate populations. And this is good news, after all,” the researchers noted.