Biodiversity loss – the silent death
How to make it clear for everyone that we are in great trouble?

Today we are facing an unprecedented crisis of the natural world. The Earth’s species are vanishing with speed never seen before in human history. This year the groundbreaking global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services presented a grim conclusion: health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life. Human actions have impacted most of our Earth, and the impact on the diversity of the natural world has been severe. With losing our biodiversity we are losing such important ecosystem functions as pollination, food security, soil building, water and air purification. Species extinction and loss of our “safety net” provided by nature happens in silence and many species disappear, unnoticed by humans. The loss of nature is happening gradually and we don’t notice the lack of one bird species, or one bee, or two bird species, or three. Not until one day we realise that we don’t hear as many bird songs as there used to be and that our garden is empty of bees. France has experienced this silence in 2018 and called it a “silent spring”. Unfortunately, when we start to notice the loss of biodiversity in our daily lives, it might be already too late.

The task is to develop a tool that would help everyone to understand what could be the impacts of biodiversity loss – what would our future look like without nature? How the species are interconnected in forming the ecological “safety net” for humans, and what consequences would we face with the loss of it? How the loss of one insect or bird can trigger a change in a whole ecosystem? This understanding should be the first step towards a transformative change of our societies and economies that is the only scenario in order to save our nature and ourselves.

For further information:
ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment