Global Biodiversity Is Falling Fast, Imperiling Humanity. Can Better Policy Avert a Collapse?

The South China tiger, the passenger pigeon, and chestnut ermine moth are extinct. The Florida yew, Sumatran rhinoceros, and North American right whales are critically endangered. And it is not just a few scattered species. Stunningly, at least half the global insect and phytoplankton biomass is now gone. Remarkably, about 96 percent of the total mammalian biomass on Earth is now humans and domestic mammals, and roughly 75 percent of the total bird biomass is domestic fowl. It is truly the age of the Anthropocene.

The tropical rainforests of South America, Southeast Asia, and equatorial Africa — the three main hotspots of terrestrial biodiversity, together treasuring a storehouse of genetic information and serving as key components of the terrestrial biosphere — have been decimated. Much of the natural habitat that remains is cut through with roads, dwellings, and larger buildings, and every imaginable sort of resource extraction activity.

Meanwhile, the challenges mount as the seas rise, invading coastal ecosystems; ocean waters become more acidic and inhospitable to many marine denizens; and terrestrial climate zones migrate toward the poles faster than their established ecosystems can keep up.

In apparent contradiction to the dire condition of biodiversity on the ground, there appears to be a robust legal regime to protect biodiversity, including the U.S. Endangered Species Act and similar legislation in many other countries. The world community has established the international CITES accord to limit trade of endangered organisms and formed the Convention on Biological Diversity. Beyond the statutory and treaty regime, one can point to substantial parks and other means of protecting natural habitats. Efforts to protect biodiversity include work by governments, businesses, and NGOs and are themselves quite diverse — debt-for-nature swaps being a prime example.

Yet somehow, that legal regime and protection efforts have been grossly ineffective. Upgrading these measures to meet the extent of the threat is in order. Our expert panel looks at the difficult issues involved in saving the global environment from biodiversity collapse.