MEDELLN: Human activity has driven animals and plants into decline in every region of the world, putting our own well-being at risk by over-harvesting and polluting, a comprehensive species survey warned on Friday.

Fish stocks may run out by 2048 and more than half of Africa’s bird and mammal species lost by 2100 unless drastic measures are taken, according to four comprehensive reports released in Medellin.

Up to 90 per cent of Asia-Pacific corals will suffer “severe degradation” by 2050, while in Europe and Central Asia, almost a third of known marine fish populations, and 42 per cent of land animals and plants, are in decline.

“This alarming trend endangers economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere,” warned the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Compiled by nearly 600 scientists over three years, the reports underline that nature provides humans with food, clean water, energy, and regulates Earth’s climate — just about everything we need to survive and thrive.

“We’re undermining our own future well-being,” IPBES chairman Robert Watson said of the findings.

“Biodiversity continues to be lost across all of the regions of the globe.

We’re losing species, we’re degrading ecosystems... if we continue ‘business as usual’, we will continue to lose biodiversity at increasing rates.” The IPBES assessment divided the world into four: the Americas, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Europe and Central Asia — the whole planet except for the Antarctic and the open seas.

Volunteer scientists combed through some 10,000 scientific publications for the most extensive biodiversity survey since 2005.

The findings were summarised in four reports approved by 129-member IPBES’ member countries in Colombia. They contain guidelines for governments to make biodiversity-friendlier policies in future.

The texts make for grim reading, and come in the same week that the death of Sudan — the world’s last northern white rhino male — served as a stark reminder of the stakes.

For the Americas, the survey warned that species populations — already 31 percent smaller than when the first European settlers arrived — will have shrunk by about 40 percent by 2050.

An estimated 500,000 square kilometres of African land is estimated to be degraded, it added.

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2018