WHERE ARE WE AT?

I just read an article titled “Humans exploiting and destroying nature on unprecedented scale – report.” It’s published on the website of The Guardian, under a collection of reporting labelled “The age of extinction.”

With a set of titles like that I had to look at the piece as well as the report informing it. The first thing I noticed is that the actual report, a joint publication from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, looks quite different than the news article about it. The huge difference between the graphs in the piece and those they are based upon from the report called my attention.

What do you notice? The graphs from the news article (top) are significantly compressed along both X and Y axis, making the declines appear more sudden and dramatic than those in the original report (bottom). To add to the distortion the huge uncertainty variances (the grey bits on either side of the white line) in the originals are entirely absent in the ones in news article. Those are some substantial distortions.

But then I also read the presented data quite differently than how its reported in the news piece. With an interest in the topic of biodiversity, I know at the outset, from our very best sources (such as the IUCN Red List) that our data on most populations of organisms are both quite recent and full of very significant gaps. Along with that I notice that the report, from 2020, contains no data since 2016.

With all that in mind, when looking at the graphs I notice that the worst declines are between the 1970s and the 1990s. And what this calls to mind is that there was comparatively little environmental awareness or protection prior to this period. In Canada, for example, most of the country only formally ceased large-scale animal killings, such as industrial whaling operations and open bounties on wolves, in the 1970s. And Canada wasn’t behind the rest of the globe on this front. Too, organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and the US Environmental Protection Agency only got up and going around this period and, of course, took time to establish themselves, gather good data, and become effective. And so what I see in these graphs is the result of growing information gathering, awareness, and ecosystem and animal protection campaigns. From such efforts one only expects population turn-arounds to become visible over longer time periods such as decades and centuries. And that’s what we see in these graphs!

Then what I notice is that, according to these graphs, we see the declines slow in the period between 1990 and 2010. And that’s the trend across the globe. It looks to me like we woke up, noticed there was a problem, and got to work rectifying things. And then what stands out for me are not only many long and flat sections but also those significant increases. And what stands out most is that the very species declines at the global scale are in the most recent five- or ten-year period (and, of course, the most recent four year period is missing.)

To me, an alternative headline (to “OMFG!!! Humans are killing nature on an unprecedented scale!!!”) could have been: "Global species declines have largely halted – and may be on the rebound – thanks to decades of hard work."