Rethinking our Attitude to Wildlife means our Attitude to Food needs Rethinking
Between 1970 and 2020, the steepest decline in biodiversity took place in Latin America, which suffered a ninety-four percent decrease in monitored wildlife population, with freshwater population falling by an average 85 percent, species such as the Amazon's pink river dolphin plummeting in numbers by as much as sixty-five percent between 1994 and 2016 in a reserve in Brazil.
Since 1970, one of the steepest declines in biodiversity took place in Africa, which experienced a 76 percent decline in the past 50 years in the population of wildlife species such as mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and birds, with the greatest decline at 85 percent happening in freshwater ecosystem, followed by 69 percent in terrestrial species, and 56 percent in marine species.
Between 1970 and 2020, another steep wildlife decline took place in Asia, which experienced a 60 percent decline in the average size of wildlife population, the white-rumped vulture population in India dropping by 67 percent, the Indian vulture by 48 percent, and the slender-billed vulture by a staggering 89 percent compared to their populations in 2002.
Europe and North America join Africa, Asia, and Latin America to ensure that global wildlife loss reached a 73 percent decline in the last 50 years, with freshwater populations having as much as 85 percent decline, and freshwater fish at risk through changes in their habitats.
Between 1990 and 2020, the forest area of Latin America fell from 53 percent to 46 percent, with the total area shrinking to 960 million hectares by 2010 and 932 million hectares by 2020, from some 1.07 billion in the early 1990s, with an estimated 5.2 million hectares of net forest loss per year in the first decades of the 21st century.
Between 2015 and 2020, the forest loss in Africa rose through an annual rate of 4.4 million hectares, with the deforestation in the southern and eastern parts of the continent hitting as much as 2.2 million hectares per year, the figure for west and central Africa put at around 1.9 million hectares of forest loss per year within the period.
Between 1990 and 2005, the forest area in Asia fell by approximately 40 million hectares, representing a 12 percent decrease in forest cover, with deforestation severe in southeast Asia, home to nearly 15 percent of the planet's tropical forest, the region now having the highest deforestation rates in the world, losing 1.2 percent of its forest every twelve months.
In other words, Africa, Asia, and Latin America remain a theater of the greatest wildlife loss, enabling the global wildlife loss to hit as much as 73 percent decline in the last 50 years, due to the catastrophic decline of their forests, in part spearheaded by economic interests in Europe and North America.
Deforestation continues to escalate in Latin America, with 17 percent of deforestation at the Amazon forest triggering biodiversity loss, both making the forest to release 20 percent more carbon in the past decade to the atmosphere than it absorbed.
Wildlife losses continue to happen in Africa, with its wetlands such as marshes and swamps diminishing, a sad situation, because they contribute to storing two times as much carbon as all of the forests in this part of the world.
Wildlife losses continue to ravage Asia, while the continent’s coastal habitats such as mangrove and seagrass suffer from retreats every year, another sad situation, because coastal habitats contribute to the sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the rate of up to ten times higher than the terrestrial forests can accomplish.
In other words, wildlife loss continues to be the trend in all of the continents on the planet, leading to global wildlife loss of 73 percent decline in the last 50 years, portending bad news to the mitigation of climate change, since wildlife acts as stores for a lot of the atmospheric carbon on the planet.
To halt wildlife loss, deforestation need to be halted, through the production of more food on less land, the restoration of degraded land, and the creation of new protected lands.
What to Eat
Vegan food from Brazil, Credit, Healthier Steps