
Given these stakes, it’s certainly front-page news that President Joe Biden has called climate change a top-tier U.S. national security threat. What’s more, he has also already scheduled an Earth Day summit to press for greater emissions reductions, committed to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050, and appointed a climate czar, Gina McCarthy, to mainstream climate policy across the U.S. government, and a special climate envoy, John Kerry, to serve as his global emissary.
However, climate change is not the only environmental emergency confronting the planet. The world is also experiencing a historic collapse of global biodiversity that merits far more attention. Its leading cause is not climate change—at least not yet—but intensive land use. Rampant pollution, invasive species and the unsustainable exploitation of living organisms are also contributing to the degradation of nature.
Collectively, these forces threaten the extinction of 1 million species, out of an estimated 8 million to 9 million in total worldwide. They also threaten the continued destruction of terrestrial and marine ecosystems that provide humanity with innumerable benefits, among them the air we breathe, the water we drink, the insects that pollinate our crops, the fisheries that feed us, the microorganisms that enrich our soils, the genetic riches that underpin new medicines, and so much more. Such “ecosystem services” rarely appear on countries’ current accounts or corporations’ balance sheets. Yet the World Economic Forum estimates that half of all global GDP is “moderately or highly dependent” on such “natural capital” assets. The fact that COVID-19 is a zoonosis—a disease produced by a virus or other pathogen that has jumped from an animal to humans, in this case from bats, by all accounts—only reinforces the intimate link between human and environmental health.
Source: It’s Time to Take Biodiversity Threats More Seriously