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Blazing fires, biblical floods and catastrophic storms are becoming increasingly common but they could be just a taste of things to come. Scientists say our planet is teetering towards a number of climate “tipping points” which could cause irreversible changes to the place we all call home.
From the Antarctic ice sheet to the Amazon rainforest, the consequences of climate change can be seen right now – but it’s not the only threat to the natural world. In a series of graphics, we take a look at some of the biggest environmental challenges facing our planet.
Dwindling biodiversity
Human activities including logging, pollution, overfishing and urban development are driving a staggering loss of biodiversity. Global wildlife populations plummeted by 69% on average between 1970 and 2018, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2022.
It notes that land-use change – which includes clearing land for agriculture or urban development – is the biggest current threat to nature, but adds that climate change is “likely to become the dominant cause of biodiversity loss in the coming decades.”
The UN’s landmark 2019 biodiversity report said that one million of all the planet’s eight million species are threatened with extinction. It reported that the global rate of extinction “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years.”
Our fading forests
Trees soak up planet-heating carbon dioxide and forests can lock away carbon for centuries, but they’re disappearing at an alarming rate due to a combination of human activities.
Southeast Asia’s peat swamp forests are home to varied wildlife and hold large below-ground carbon stocks but many of these forests have been drained and degraded to make room for farmland. Drained peatland can dry up and turn into a tinderbox, and if it catches fire, it can release up to 10 times more carbon than forest fires.
Elsewhere, researchers have found that some tropical forests – including the southeastern part of the Amazon rainforest – are shifting from a carbon sink to a carbon source, adding more carbon into the atmosphere.
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