from the World Wildlife Fund | World Wildlife Fund issues 10th edition of ‘The Living Planet Report,’ a science-based assessment of the planet’s health
Washington, DC – Monday, September 29: Between 1970 and 2010 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent, says the 2014 Living Planet Report released today by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This biodiversity loss occurs disproportionately in low-income countries—and correlates with the increasing resource use of high-income countries.
In addition to the precipitous decline in wildlife populations the report’s data point to other warning signs about the overall health of the planet. The amount of carbon in our atmosphere has risen to levels not seen in more than a million years, triggering climate change that is already destabilizing ecosystems. High concentrations of reactive nitrogen are degrading lands, rivers and oceans. Stress on already scarce water supplies is increasing. And more than 60 percent of the essential “services” provided by nature, from our forests to our seas, are in decline.
“We’re gradually destroying our planet’s ability to support our way of life,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF. “But we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and its time we started acting within those limits.”
The Living Planet Report, WWF’s biennial flagship publication, measures trends in three major areas:
- populations of more than ten thousand vertebrate species;
- human ecological footprint, a measure of consumption of goods, greenhouse gas emissions; and
- existing biocapacity, the amount of natural resources for producing food, freshwater, and sequestering carbon.
“There is a lot of data in this report and it can seem very overwhelming and complex,” said Jon Hoekstra, chief scientist at WWF. “What’s not complicated are the clear trends we’re seeing — 39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone – all in the past 40 years.”
The report says that the majority of high-income countries are increasingly consuming more per person than the planet can accommodate; maintaining per capita ecological footprints greater than the amount of biocapacity available per person. People in middle- and low-income countries have seen little increase in their per capita footprints over the same time period.
While high-income countries show a 10 percent increase in biodiversity, the rest of the world is seeing dramatic declines. Middle-income countries show 18 percent declines, and low-income countries show 58 percent declines. Latin America shows the biggest decline in biodiversity, with species populations falling by 83 percent.
“High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses,” said Keya Chatterjee, WWF’s senior director of footprint. “In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion.”
The report underscores that the declining trends are not inevitable. To achieve globally sustainable development, each country’s per capita ecological footprint must be less than the per capita biocapacity available on the planet, while maintaining a decent standard of living.
At the conclusion of the report, WWF recommends the following actions:
- Accelerate shift to smarter food and energy production
- Reduce ecological footprint through responsible consumption at the personal, corporate and government levels
- Value natural capital as a cornerstone of policy and development decisions
For birds, fishes , reptiles and amphibians, and mammals, half or slightly more are increasing, a bit less than half are decreasing, and a thin sliver are unchanging.Discover more from Watts Up With That?
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This is as bogus as the Tibetan glacier phony report. But the NGO system is so corrupt that they are incentivized to fabricate and propogate untruths.
Well, if half the world’s wildlife is lost then maybe they should stop following the directions of the WWF.
I hadn’t seen that link of Eschenbach’s before–definitely worth looking at. –AGF
WWF – TBS, read Total Bull Shit
The article is confused.
The WWF report is about wildlife numbers. Where are the Corpses is about species extinction.
They are very different.
For example, the fish that have been fished will not leave their corpses. They have been eaten.
Is the WWF report rubbish? Probably.
But this article doesn’t prove that un any way.
So if poverty is the cause how does keeping people poor by blocking cheap energy help? Meanwhile the same dead Enders continue blocking real strides in efficiency like diesel cars, hydro, fracking for gas and limited yield nuclear! The crazies are running the world and though there has been no warming they insist we all comply. I look fwd to the day when we can get back to conservation because we’re cheap instead of for a bad hoax.
Lets not be so harsh, I mean the Roman empire can be argued went extinct due to high resource usage and being a high-income empire which somehow is tied to climate change centuries later because animals are dying… or something liket that.
Recently have seen a bobcat and her cubs and wild turkeys in my backyard along with the annual deers and coyotes. I can unequivically state the wildlife around where I live is thriving. Which like the WWF report of course means nothing in terms of global wildlife populations.
Is this what science has become, someone comes up with some hokey math and then presumes to understand how the earths biology, geology, weather, chemistry, oceans, etc works.
Inductive reasoning has degraded science to a philosophy. The abuse of statistical inference in the real world has consequences.
That said, around 2 million Americans, and around 50 million globally, are lost in abortion clinics annually. I cannot relate to people who empathize more with animal than human life.
So the entire report is “baseless”.
What is that view derived from ?
The sceptic community appears to work largely on the basis that humans cannot possibly influence much on good old Earth and that any suggestion they do is extreme greenery.
This really is The Age of Stupid if serious reports based on substantial evidence are just dumped on the basis “we don’t like it”.
Reading the Living Planet Report, I came across this interesting chart …
For birds, reptiles and amphibians, fishes, and mammals, half or slightly more are increasing, a bit less than half are decreasing, and a thin sliver are unchanged.
Setting aside the obvious problems with the counting and the categorization, I fear I don’t find that result either surprising or alarming. Half increasing, half decreasing … and? Did they expect them all to be increasing all the time?
In many places, there is indeed an underlying and ongoing problem of the loss of local biodiversity. It is not helped by this kind of hysteria.
w.
A decline in species is probably more to do with introduction of a non- indigenous species that becomes dominant and crowds out the local species,
The grey squirrel in the Uk nearly wiped out the Red Squirrel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia
“Since their introduction from Europe in the 19th century, the effect of rabbits on the ecology of Australia has been devastating. They are suspected of being the most significant known factor in species loss in Australia”
I would imagine that with the destruction of plant loss comes the decline in insects, birds, animals.
So I read their report, dug into their stated methodology and came away with the following information. This study is based on 3038 vertebrate species in 10000+ populations from a total of 2337 data sources (not all peer reviewed or even scientific). There are more than 62839 vertebrate species in an even greater number of populations. The method they use is based on determining a trend over a minimum of two years and back tracking that trend to 1970 then forward to 2010. Then they weight the information based on the total number of species (62839) to represent what is happening throughout the globe. Interestingly enough the straight weighted report found 28% decline but with their new methodology they discovered it was worse than they thought at 52%. I think the very idea of taking a trend over a short time frame, extending it to 40 years and magically weighting it creates potential inaccuracies that in my mind invalidate the report. Their exact data and statistical calculations are not available for reproduction and without and independent look at their data I would say that their report does not pass a smell test.
I suspect the initial 3038 species were specifically selected because these were stressed to begin with. Kind of like going to hospital, counting the sick people, and then applying this to all society. If they cant do this sort of faulty stuff in medicine, why does this pass muster in biology.?
If you were going to do a study of a species population count, would you not pick one that might get you published, or at least noticed? How many articles about healthy deer populations get written? This is not analysis, it is re-analysis of a selection of studies, databases and “grey literature” that are unconsciously biased by the researchers before they even start. So it is no wonder that they show declining numbers.
Yawn, just some more so called CAGW “experts”. Master liars.
Aren’t these media orgs invested in these lies the ones with their pensions heavily into carbon stocks?
So glad we installed a wood stove and invested into a few acres of wooded property.
Sounds like windmills and Google’s bird toaster are having a far worse effect than previously thought.
Rainforests are a jungle.
The most prosperous and peaceful places on earth, for humans, tend to have low biodiversity. It’s the same reason we have shopping malls, clean hospitals, and urban jungles, keeps the nasties out.
Although we haven’t yet figured out a way to keep the tripe such as the above from the WWF being produced.
WWF conveniently forget to mention that humans is only 0.019% of the live biomass of earth. There are more cows than humans by weight. 20 times more fishes than humans by weight. 7 times more domesticated animals than humans by weight. The increase in cow population in past 40 years is more than the decline in populations of wild animals. And live biomass production is 100 billion tons per year. Not even counting bacteria, which exceeds the biomass of plants, animals and humans combined.
“We’re gradually destroying our planet’s ability to support our way of life,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF.
With 100 billion tons per year of live biomass production, it seems we’re not doing a good job in destroying life on earth. 7 times more domesticated animals than humans by weight. Guess who produced domesticated animals. 12,000 years ago there were no domesticated animals. We’re doing a good job in creating new life. If we are destroying our planet’s ability to support human life, why is human population still increasing? It should be decreasing. Death rate must be exceeding birth rate. The opposite is happening.
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it! and commented:
Most of these species extinctions bypassed the endangered species act.
“There are approximately 4,500 species of mammals, 5,500 of amphibians, 8,000 reptiles, 10,000 birds and 30,000 marine species currently recognised by science, and that doesn’t include the untold numbers of invertebrates, bacteria and smaller beings (it is believed that there are 15000-20000 species of butterfly).
On average, 2 new species of fish are found every week, and it is thought that the jungles of the world contain many more amphibians and reptiles than have yet been named. Even now we still get a few new bird species discovered every year, and, amazingly, new species of mammal are still found occasionally.”
http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/*:newspecies&template=new_species#cr
“The Living Planet Report, WWF’s biennial flagship publication, measures trends in three major areas:
1- populations of more than ten thousand vertebrate species;
2- human ecological footprint, a measure of consumption of goods, greenhouse gas emissions; and
3- existing biocapacity, the amount of natural resources for producing food, freshwater, and sequestering carbon.” (Above)
According to the first quote there are more than 58,000 species of vertebrates currently recognized by science and the number is growing by at least 2 per week – if we only count fish.
According to the second quote, the WWF is relying on 10,000 species of vertebrates to back their claim that the populations have declined by 52%.
I leave it to everyone to draw their own conclusions as to whether the WWF claims are baseless or not.
~100% of all humanoids born in 1900 are no longer alive … just thought I’d put that up with the WWF dead animals claim. Truth is that they have been replaced with the following generations.
For Evan, from WWf website:
Key Facts
Common Names
Black rhino, hook-lipped rhinoceros; Rhinocéros noir (Fr); Rinoceronte negro (Sp)
Scientific Name
Diceros bicornis
Location
From Cameroon in the west to Kenya in the east, and south to South Africa
Status
Critically Endangered
More…
Population
4,880 individuals as of Feb 2013
.Hmmm, not very extinct then.
So let me get this right, half are decreasing and half are increasing? So little to no net loss of animal population overall. Sounds awfully similar to the regular ‘worse than we thought’ claim from the same NGO about Arctic summer ice loss when Antarctic ice is up all year around so no net ice loss globally.
At least with ice coverage, you can actually record it with satellite measurements over a period of time, anything regarding animal population is pure guesswork. And aren’t Individual species populations always in a state of flux as part of evolution anyway?
We still regularly get the WWF buying advertising slots on TV here in the UK (and by that I mean begging for annual profits) to make claims of the Polar Bear population being under threat. The WWF doesn’t care about facts, facts don’t get contributions.
I’m loathe to believe anything that the WWF says, and they only have their own hysterical tone to blame for this, in my humble opinion. That said, I want to be a good steward of the Earth, even as I accept that every human being in existence demands resources that stress the living systems of the planet. Just like in individual humans, stress is a natural, normal, expected part of living. Evolution could not diversify life forms into niches without stress and the natural responses to it. This report actually supports the notion that wealthier societies are more able to mitigate their own damage to wild systems, by making cultivation more productive, making animal husbandry more efficient. The WWF doesn’t care about trade-offs. They’re absolutist and fanatical, and have become more misanthropic over the past 50 years. That’s the trend that matters here.
More estimates from models. Translation from the WWF: “The sky is falling! Send more money!”
WWF.
Stole the title from World Wrestling Federation, who were a much more credible outfit with better actors.
The Official WWF is running a save the Polar Bears add campaign here on Canadian TV.
If you are so stunned as to give any credit to utterances from those phonies, please send your name address and bank account number to xxxxxxx…Cause you are ready for the sucker list.
Perhaps as the costs of this CAGW scheme come home to taxpayers they will develop a more reasonable attitude toward hysterical planet savers. Like the back of your hand or toe of boot.