Late last year, 11,000 scientists from 153 countries posed the warning that humanity faces "untold suffering" unless it effects major societal transformations.
In all but three years from 2000 to 2016, wildfires have devoured at least 3.7 million acres. More than 100 million people live in locales experiencing poor air quality, and groundwater supplies have rapidly decreased since 2001.
If we fail to enact the immediate, radical action necessary to prevent the atmosphere from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius--2.7 degrees Fahrenheit--over pre-industrial levels, further effects are, according to Michael Oppenheimer, climate scientist at Princeton University, "indescribable".
Oppenheimer said:
It would turn the world upside down in terms of its climate. There would be nothing like it in the history of civilization.
We're looking at acidic oceans dissolving coral reefs, cities like Manhattan and Miami inundated, extreme and persistent heat waves, food shortages, threats to governments' stability, more frequent and larger wildfires, growing risks to property and life, mounting air pollution levels, increases in diseases, hunger, and mass migrations.
Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and West Nile cases are expected to more than double by 2050.
According to a 1,800-page United Nations global assessment Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IBPES) report more than 450 scientists and diplomats took over three years to compile from 15,000 academic studies and reports, the accelerating decline of Earth's natural life-support systems has made everything endangered species--including human beings.
According to the report, nature is being obliterated tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.
16 to 33% of all warm-water coral reefs are suffering bleaching; rainforests are devolving into savannahs; wild mammal biomass has declined 82%; natural ecosystems have lost about half their area; and a million species are at risk of extinction, most alarmingly at least one in 10 insects and two in five amphibian species.
Robert Watson, IBPES chair, warned:
The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now.
Dr. Kate Brauman, from the University of Minnesota, a coordinating lead author, added:
We have documented a really unprecedented decline in biodiversity and nature; this is completely different than anything we've seen in human history in terms of the rate of decline and the scale of the threat. When we laid it all out together I was just shocked to see how extreme the declines are in terms of species and in terms of the contributions that nature is providing to people.
Humans' damage to the planet is due to an explosion in population (doubled since 1970), staggering economic growth, and global trade that has led to destruction of forests, particularly in tropical areas.
Between 1980 and 2000, 100 million tropical forest hectares disappeared, mainly due to cattle ranching in South America and palm oil plantation farming in Southeast Asia.
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