Ecological crisis

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Planetary Boundaries
Planetary Boundaries

The world won't end tomorrow, next year or the year after. But it will get progressively worse, each day we do nothing we roll a dice where the probability of something seriously bad happening goes up and up. We have already seen the following:

  • Climate change - since records began in 1880, nineteen of the twenty hottest years have occured since 2000[1].
  • Biodiversity loss - there has been a 68% average decline in the population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish between 1970 and 2016[2].
  • Deforestation - more than half the world’s tropical forests have been destroyed since the 1960s[3].
  • Ocean acidification - more CO2 in the atmosphere means more acidity in the oceans.
  • Ozone depletion
  • Microplastics via overconsumption.
  • the nitrogen cycle
  • the phosphorus cycle

These issues combined are accelerating us towards collapse.

References

  1. NASA, Global Temperature: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
  2. IPBES, Media Release, Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ May 2019
  3. International Union for Conservation of Nature. (2021, February). Deforestation and forest degradation. https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/deforestation-and-forest-degradation

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