Billions of people are affected by biodiversity crisis

By: Charlie Wang

Billions of people from around the world depend on wildlife for food, medicine, and other critical necessities. But now scientists prove that biodiversity is declining because of hunting and other practices.

A report which took four years to write was specifically prepared by 85 experts for the United Nations. The expert research is the most effective report looking into wildlife sustainability because it gives us ways of treating wildlife while also giving us information on how to stop them from declining for future generations. Scientific study shows that Indigenous and poor communities are the most to be affected by a decrease in wildlife species.

“Half of humanity benefits from and makes use of wild species, and often without even knowing that they’re doing so,” said Marla R. Emery, one of the co-chairs of the assessment, which was conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The summary was read and approved and now the report was set for publication in just a few months.

In 2019, our natural biodiverse world was about to collapse; this was because of how we humans changed nature. This event was so dramatic that it almost led 1 million species to go extinct. A year later the United Nations announced that they will be using an international commitment made in 2020 to increase biodiversity.

Trees aren’t the only ones important to balance our ecosystem. “It’s about the water, the plants and the animals, the microorganisms,” forests are also a big part of climate change it absorbs carbon, Ms. Tauli-Corpuz said.

People who depend on wildlife will start being affected by these decreases in biodiversity. “If wildlife disappears, our culture is at risk, our lifestyle and our livelihood is at risk,” said Viviana Figueroa, an Argentine Indigenous lawyer also a part of International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. “There is still a lot of work to be done, but at least there is some recognition,” Ms. Figueroa said. We need to act into keeping the ecosystem sustainable so we can have our necessary items and keep our ecosystem in balance.