Earth is dying, and we're to blame.
Human activity in the past few hundred years has dwindled the planet's capacity to provide for our needs sustainably.
And if you think it's bad now, you haven't seen anything yet.
A recent study was published in the latest issue of Science to model ecosystem services, which refers to the benefits we receive from Earth's capacity to provide for us (e.g. naturally cleaned drinking water, bee-pollinated vegetables, etc.), on a global level using fine-scale data.
Led by Becky Chaplin-Kramer, Ph.D., lead scientist of Stanford University's Natural Capital Project, the planet's current situation and future scenarios (based on global development trends) were modelled for three critical ecosystem services: regulating water quality, reducing coastal risk, and pollinating crops.
The findings are straight out of a doomsday scenario.
Up to five billion people are set to be affected in 2050 by growing levels of water pollution, increasing numbers of coastal hazards (e.g. shoreline erosion, flooding, etc.), and rising losses of crops due to under pollination. With the UN's estimate of 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2050, that puts more than 50% of the world's population at risk from these upcoming crises.
It's also expected that developing countries in Africa and South Asia will be the ones to bear the brunt of the damage. More than half of their populations are in areas of above-average benefit gaps (the tangible effects of insufficient benefits provided by ecosystem services), leaving them at the highest risk from these future crises.
While things look bleak, the study also shines a small ray of hope. By shaping public policy towards sustainable development and conservation efforts, the threats to human survival can be diminished by three- to ten-fold. However, urgent collective action worldwide is necessary if we want to achieve this.
That's why the team at the Natural Capital Project built an interactive map from the study's findings as part of a toolbox to help convey natural capital information in a visual and easily digestible way.
Several tools in the toolbox would be of great interest to researchers, from simulating watershed conservation activities, charting coastal vulnerabilities, mapping nature's contributions to people all over the world, to so much more.
Just as important is being able to communicate this data effectively to make the science more accessible and more easily understood to the public, and especially its officials, with the hope it provides the necessary call to action towards environmental sustainability. In an article in the Natural Capital Project website, Chaplin-Kramer shares:
"We hope that this work will advance the integration of nature's contributions to people into decision making and further galvanize global action...We're equipped with the information we need to avert the worst scenarios our models project and move toward an equitable, sustainable future. Now is the time to wield it."
And wield it, we should, before it's too little, too late.
