Whild reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells I stumbled upon a paper called Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat by David. S. Battisti and Rosamond L. Naylor. It is written in 2009 and I was interested reading it. As it is a scientific paper, you need either to pay for it or start a memberhsip at science.org / aaas.org. I decided to start a membership.
While starting to read the paper I came to a link at un.org where the extinction of animals is dicsussed: UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’.
It is dramatical and it is so much alarming. And the badest part is the interaction of all these facts.
The article summarizes it as follows:
- Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
- More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
- The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.
- Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US $577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
- In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
- Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992.
- Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.
- Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios explored in the Report, except those that include transformative change – due to the projected impacts of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms and climate change, although with significant differences between regions.
(Source: un.org Nature decline unprecedented report, section Other notable findings of the Report include)
I will continue reading about all this and will try to find a way to help solving this problem. It is a global killer if we do not change and help the nature help itself.