A world under threat

Photo by PARALAXIS

Our main conservation challenges are trying to avoid the threats that we face all around the world. Interestingly, we can see different changes in species loss in different parts of the world, but the threats are pretty consistent across the whole world.

Around 50% of species that are under threat are there because of various kinds of land conversion. For about a quarter, it’s over-exploitation: and a lot of that is trees and fish, not just the things you typically think of as conservation-dependent. Then there are other factors like invasive species and pollution.

Interestingly, climate change is the main driver for only around 5 to 10% of threatened species at the moment, but obviously that is going to continue.

50 years of hurt

Humans have always been living with the nature of our planet. We’ve always been converting our planet and using the species on it, but it’s only really in the last 50 years that we’ve been able to convert the planet on a massive scale.

If you put it into historical context, you can see evidence of hunting and land use change throughout human history and, of course, much of Europe was converted centuries ago. So, what we’re living in is already a very human-modified area. The areas that concern us now, conservation-wise, are the ones where conversion has had a lighter touch up until now.

Climate change is going to be a huge issue, but much of the effects from climate change are exacerbating effects that were already there. Currently, the most urgent threats to species and habitats are not about climate change: they’re about our use of land.

How nature changes over our lifetimes

Each generation remembers what nature was like when they were children. We calibrate our entire understanding of our natural history and our loss of nature to that time.

When I think about my childhood, I think about lapwings, large aggregations of starlings, orchids and those kinds of things because I was born in a chalk grassland in the South Downs of the United Kingdom. Each of us is calibrated to those things.

Of course, the previous generation was calibrated to something very different. You realise this when you go to other places where there’s huge biodiversity. When I went to Australia, it was a huge revelation about what biodiversity can be like, because I was used to the biodiversity of my childhood.

The other thing we need to remember is that, even over our own lifetimes, we forget how things were. So, you might think, oh, well, nothing really has changed in nature. But then you might ask yourself, when did I last see a really large aggregation of starlings? When did I see a particular orchid species that I used to think of as common? Then you realise that it’s maybe only been a couple of years, or maybe it’s been longer.

I was thinking about my son, who’s 20, and about taking him around our garden as a child. Ten years ago, we very rarely found caterpillars. Then I remember my childhood when I was always finding those big furry caterpillars. My mum used to say, ‘Don’t touch it!’ It was quite a common species. Yet, I don’t remember ever saying that to my son, and that’s because I didn’t see it. I think we all need to think about that.

Hard facts about species loss

Photo by Konoplytska

In Europe, we’re blessed with having really long-term datasets. We’ve got bird datasets going back centuries because we have people who have been watching the birds. It can be scrappier in other parts of the world, but long-term datasets allow us to chart these declines.

That’s why I was able to say with some confidence that, in terms of wild terrestrial vertebrates, we have lost 68% since 1970. There’s some uncertainty around that, but these figures come from those long-term datasets.

So, how do you use this data to understand what’s happening? Think about it in these terms. Of all the mammals on the planet, 4% are wild, 60% are domestic livestock and 36% are humans. That’s a huge shift from what it would have been a few centuries ago. A lot of land conversion is actually happening in order to graze our livestock and to grow feed for our livestock, meaning ever more intensification and ever more ability to produce fast, quick meat. The same statistics for birds are 30% wild and 70% poultry. All this data gives us a good indication of what land conversion looks like.

Living without nature is a sterile existence

Land conversion mainly means the end of the wild; turning most of the world into what we see in Europe, which is semi-wild but mostly domesticated agricultural landscapes. Those agricultural landscapes are not without value. We have biodiversity in our agricultural landscapes, but they are dual-purpose landscapes. One of the things we may need to think about, as we move forward, is how to have more biodiversity-rich dual landscapes where people and nature co-exist.

I think there’s a real tension within conservation about whether we go the way of separating humans from nature. Do we hold onto the wildness that we still have, i.e. the unconverted areas or converted areas where there is still nature? And then separate out the humans so that we intensify the areas that we have, and grow our food? That’s one way to think about it. The alternative way is to have multi-functional landscapes in which humans, wildlife and natural and converted landscapes can be more integrated.

I’m more for that second path, because I think humans without nature is a sterile existence. I think there’s quite a lot of evidence that people need wild places. People need nature in order to have good well-being, and that includes within the cities. We need to think about how we green our cities and how we live alongside and with nature. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have wild spaces – those last close to pristine areas – but we need to think about how we live alongside nature as well.

North America isn’t Africa

The international way of thinking about conservation actually stems from the North American experience, where they have vast areas that are still relatively natural. They have these big protected areas where they think they can maintain a semi-natural function. That doesn’t work in Europe, and I’m not sure it works terribly well in most parts of Africa.

One of the big fallacies we’ve had in our export of conservation from North America and Europe into places like Africa is thinking that you can exclude people from natural areas; that you can take an area that is perhaps lightly populated or where people are using it for a pastoral livelihood, think that it’s empty and treat it accordingly. I think it was the same in South America – coming in thinking that areas were empty because they didn’t accord with your idea of human use, and then truly emptying them.

For example, we brought rinderpest to 19th century Africa. It was a massive epidemic that killed large numbers of domestic animals and wildlife. That meant that when Europeans were thinking about setting up large protected areas like the Serengeti, rinderpest had already run through, and they seemed empty of livestock and people. We were seeing an unnatural kind of fluctuation of what nature should be, and that was caused by us.

This comes back to what I was saying before about shifting baselines, about not seeing the bigger picture and therefore thinking that everything we see now is how things should be or have always been.

A pragmatic approach to biodiversity

Photo by Damsea

As we look back, we should also look forward. We need to realise that we can’t put nature back to where it was. We can’t look back in order to think about what our future needs to look like. We need to think about our future as new ecosystems, new kinds of groups of species. What will come in the future is not going to be the same as what existed in the past.

In order to move forward, we have to think about the precious species, ecosystems, interactions and processes that we want to conserve. We need to think about them in the context of the new ecosystems that we’re going to have through climate change: through new species that are coming in. It’s worth noting that not all new species that come into areas are damaging. Some species happily co-exist with other species. As climate change kicks in, we’re going to have colonisations of species shifting their ranges. That’s going to change our ecosystems. That won’t necessarily be negative; it’ll just be different.

Conservationists, like everyone else, put values on things. We sometimes think of biodiversity as having some kind of moral value. I think that’s our own projection. Biodiversity just is. Nature just is. Ecological processes just are. So, when we value some species over others, we need to remember that it’s our construction. It’s not how nature actually works.

Discover more about

biodiversity

WWF (2020). Living Planet Report 2020: Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss. Almond, R.E.A., Grooten M. and Petersen, T. (Eds). WWF, Gland, Switzerland.

Tilman, D., Clark, M., Williams, D. et al. (2017). Future threats to biodiversity and pathways to their prevention. Nature, 546, 73–81.

Papworth, S.K., Rist, J., Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2009). Evidence for shifting baseline syndrome in conservation. Conservation Letters, 2(2), 93-100.

Land conversion and the end of the wild