[ad_1]
Humans are killing wildlife at an “unprecedented” rate with wildlife populations averaging 68 percent since 1970, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund.
Unsustainable agriculture and deforestation are two of the main drivers, and urgent action is required to reverse the trend, the Living Planet Report 2020 said.
“Our planet has intermittent red warning signs,” said Marco Lambertini, CEO of WWF International, an NGO that focuses on preserving nature.
“From the fish in our oceans and rivers to bees, which play a crucial role in our agricultural production, the decline in wildlife directly affects the nutrition, food security and livelihoods of billions of people.” .
The situation is most severe in the tropics of Latin America, where species have declined on average by 94 percent following massive deforestation and conversion of wilderness to agriculture.
Land clearing and deforestation has reached record levels in Brazil in recent years, as farmers seek to convert forests and grasslands for agriculture. Grazing cattle and soybean cultivation, which is used mainly as animal feed for the meat industry, are the main drivers.
Three-quarters of the ice-free land surface has been disturbed and no longer contains wilderness areas, according to the report, while most of the oceans are now polluted and more than 85 percent of the planet’s wetlands have been lost.
The report calls for the world to reform the unsustainable food system, increase protected areas for wildlife and for people in meat-intensive countries like the United States to shift their diets to a “lower proportion of animal calories.”
The findings underscore the fact that the planet faces twin crises in biodiversity and climate and the two are intrinsically linked, according to the report. A warmer climate puts up to a fifth of all species at risk of extinction in the next century and those in the biodiversity tropics are at higher risk.
Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics
The severity of the climate crisis was further underlined on Wednesday when joint studies by the US and the UK, published in the Cryosphere Journal, identified how Antarctica’s massive Thwaites glacier could be at risk of rapid melting after cavities. larger-than-expected warm oceanic areas, which could erode it from below. – they were identified.
James Yungel Archive / NASA
The glacier has been dubbed the “glacier at the end of the world” because of its enormous size, as big as the state of Florida, and its ability to raise sea level by more than 25 inches on its own if it were to collapse rapidly.
Historically low levels of sea ice allowed research teams to map the seafloor, from a ship and an airplane, leading them to identify the warm water channels that reach the bottom of the glacier.
They found that the ocean is deeper and the channels of warm water wider than previously thought.
“For the first time we have a clear view of the pathways by which warm water can reach the bottom of the glacier, causing it to melt and contribute to global sea level rise,” said lead author Dr. Kelly Hogan of the British Antarctic Survey. .
Thwaites ice loss has increased rapidly over the past 30 years and now accounts for 4 percent of the global sea level rise.
