Had a bad weekend? Maybe your team faded against relegated-months-ago Huddersfield Town, consigning your flickering hopes of a Champions League qualification spot to the wastebin. Or maybe you support Arsenal.
Anyway, Smartodds loves Statistics is here to help you put things in perspective: ‘We are in trouble‘. But not trouble in the sense of having to play Europa League qualifiers on a Thursday night. Trouble in the sense that…
Human society is under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life
Yes, deep shit trouble.
This is according to a Global Assessment report by the United Nations, based on work by hundreds of scientists who compiled as many as 15,000 academic studies. Here are some of the headline statistics:
- Nature is being destroyed at a rate of tens to hundreds of times greater than the average over the last 10 million years;
- The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%;
- Natural ecosystems have lost around half of their area;
- A million species are at risk of extinction;
- Pollinator loss has put up to £440 billion of crop output at risk;
The report goes on to say:
The knock-on impacts on humankind, including freshwater shortages and climate instability, are already “ominous” and will worsen without drastic remedial action.
But if only we could work out what the cause of all this is. Oh, hang on, the report says it’s…
… all largely as a result of human actions.
For example, actions like these:
- Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of global land;
- Wetlands have drained by 83% since 1700;
- In the years 2000-2013 the area of intact forest fell by 7% – an area the size of France and the UK combined;
- More than 80% of wastewater, as well as 300-400m tons of industrial waste, is pumped back into natural water reserves without treatment;
- Plastic waste is a factor of tens greater than in 1980, affecting 86% of marine turtles, 44% of seabirds and 43% of marine animals.
- Fertiliser run-off has created 400 dead zones – an area the size of the UK.
You probably don’t need to be a bioscientist and certainly not a statistician to realise none of this is particularly good news. However, the report goes on to list various strategies that agencies, governments and countries need to adopt in order to mitigate against the damage that has already been done and minimise the further damage that will unavoidably be done under current regimes. But none of it’s easy, and evidence so far is not in favour of collective human will to accept the responsibilities involved.
Josef Settele of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany said
People shouldn’t panic, but they should begin drastic change. Business as usual with small adjustments won’t be enough.
So, yes, cry all you like about Liverpool’s crumbling hopes for a miracle against Barcelona tonight, but keep it in perspective and maybe even contribute to the wider task of saving humanity from itself.
<End of rant. Enjoy tonight’s game.>
Correction: *Bareclona’s* crumbling hopes
