Author/Contact:
Network Nature
Resource description:
The world’s diverse ecosystems including farmlands, forests, freshwater, grasslands, shrublands and savannahs, mountains, oceans and coasts, peatlandsand urban areas have degraded significantly with negative impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods. Overexploitation of natural resources throughout centuries has disrupted the equilibrium of the ecosystem.
Our survival as a species depends on the health of the ecosystem. Yet biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species, and within ecosystems—is declining faster than it has at any other time in human history. The current rate of extinction is much higher than the average over the past 10 million years—and it its accelerating. We are well underway with a 6th mass extinction also known as the Anthropocene extinction (EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030).The global population of wild species has fallen by 60% over the last 40 years, with 1 million species at risk of extinction, including eventually humans as well, the UN warns. This rate of loss would have taken thousands of years if it were not for the human destruction of nature, scientists say, warning of an approaching tipping point for the collapse of civilization (Earth.org, 2020).
