Humans to blame for declining wildlife populations
The World Wildlife Fund has just released their 2014 report on the state of the world’s wildlife populations. The “Living Planet Report” provides an index by which to consider the changes in populations of various species around the world.
The results of the report are shocking, to say the least.
According to the report, there has been a 52 per cent decline in wildlife populations around the globe between 1970 and 2010. This decline is largely attributed to human actions.
This staggeringly high statistic comes only two years after WWF put the same number at 28 per cent in their 2012 report. According to WWF, the change comes as a result of new methods they used in the study, which give a higher statistical weight to underrepresented taxonomic groups in the data set.
According to the report, freshwater species, including frogs and amphibians, are the hardest hit, experiencing declines of 79 per cent over the past four decades. Marine species experienced a decline of 39 per cent , with the most affected animals being sea turtles and sharks.
In addition to startling figures like those above, the report makes use of a number of pictures and colourful graphs to exhibit the current state of the populations of wildlife around the world. It is written in simple terms and with minimal jargon, which makes it seem very convincing.
As believable as the report may seem, the methods of WWF have come under question. The study that led to this report was a meta-analysis of populations of 3,038 different species of vertebrates, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. This is only a small fraction of the approximately 62,305 described species of vertebrates. The study also does not take into account plants or invertebrates, which make up the rest of the approximately 1.9 million species presently described.
On top of the huge difference between the sample size and the number of described species, it is estimated that 80 per cent of the world’s species remain unknown to science, so there is a high degree of uncertainty that comes along with the results of the report.
The conclusions arrived at in this report may be an overestimation or misrepresentation of the facts due to limited data, but the trends that the report identifies are undeniable.
In a relatively short period of time, the rate of extinction on Earth has skyrocketed. It is said that we are entering the sixth mass extinction, for which humans are the primarily cause.
There is no doubt that human actions have caused the declines and demise of countless species. The WWF report cites exploitation in the form of hunting and fishing as the biggest cause of population declines worldwide, but it is likely that the loss or destruction of habitat is the greatest cause of extinctions and reductions in populations. Other causes include the introduction of invasive species, and climate change, which is now being more widely recognized as correlated with human activity.
In their “Living Planet Report,” WWF may be misconstruing the facts and coming to some far-fetched conclusions, but there is one thing that they are not wrong about. Humans are bringing about unprecedented changes to the natural world and having a devastating impact on much of the biological community.
We may be the cause of the problem of declining wildlife populations, but that does not mean that we cannot become the solution. The decision lies with us, whether we will give in and accept the stark forecast of collapsed levels of biodiversity, or whether we will work to ensure the incredible diversity of life on Earth persists for generations to come.