According to him WWF Living Planet Report 2020 (World Wide Fund for Nature), Wild animal populations have fallen by two thirds since 1970. Specifically, 68% in global populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016.

Freshwater wildlife have also suffered a decline of 84%, the steepest average population decline in any biome, equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.

The principal cause

The main factor in this animal loss is due to our diet.: We need a lot of land to produce food, which results in habitat loss and degradation, including deforestation.

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That is, to solve the problem, drastic measures must be taken, both in the way we eat and manage food, as well as invest more in the protection of certain environments.

The Living Planet Index (LPI), provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) tracked almost 21,000 populations of more than 4,000 vertebrate species between 1970 and 2016. As Gun explains Tim Newbold, from the UCL Biodiversity and Environment Research Center (University College London):

Changing land use, whether for agriculture, energy, transport or housing, has a profound impact on biodiversity, as many plants and animals can no longer survive in an environment, and the remaining wild nature may not be large enough to support a species. This is now affecting the composition of plants and animals, as generalist species are better able to survive while more specialized species become extinct.

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The news

Global animal populations have declined by an average of two-thirds in less than half a century.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Unlike the estimation of other social costs of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one has been made that goes beyond the year 2100.

In this way, it is estimated that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere will cost future generations $100,000 per ton, a thousand times more than what was calculated for our generation.

Generational costs

The study, carried out by two geoscientists and a philosopher from the University of Chicago, published in the journal Climatic Change, calculates the so-called “social cost of carbon”, a number intended to represent the value of all future damages to our generation in today's dollars.

The calculations take into account the full magnitude of sea level rise, which reduces, among other things, cropland. The final costs are a thousand times higher than the normally calculated present value of those costs because climate change will persist a thousand times longer than our generation, according to one of the authors, David Archer, computational climate scientist:

What we wanted to achieve with this calculation is a better idea of the burden we are imposing on future generations. This is not intended to be a realistic estimate of the present value of costs, but is our attempt to try to put the enormous time scales into more understandable units. Most people are not geologists, and even for us it's really hard to think about how long the changes we're making now are going to last.

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The authors emphasized that the model is not intended to be an exact measurement, but rather to help people visualize the future. The costs are also added assuming that there is no economic growth in the current world.

Because it is impossible to reliably predict humanity's long-term future, we had to make unrealistic simplifying assumptions, such as that humanity lives in a stable state with a planet's carrying capacity without changes in technology.

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The news

The future cost of pollution: around $100,000 per ton of carbon

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.