In 2020, I was a fresh PhD graduate working on forest–insect associations, the effect of forest loss and community forest management, when COVID-19 brought the world to a halt. Anthropogenic activities, such as those causing unprecedented forest loss and fragmentation, were among the reasons discussed for the spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from its natural host to humans. Diaz and colleagues’ paper, which I first read during lockdown, discusses the status, trends and future of the interconnectedness of humans and nature, and the consequences of anthropogenic activities.
Diaz and colleagues, summarizing and building on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment, provide evidence of the human alteration of nature and its unequal global impacts. Nature’s contributions to people — including habitat creation and maintenance, pollination and the dispersal of seeds, and the regulation of detrimental organisms and biological processes — showed declining global trends from 1970 to 2018, which reflect the reduced capacity of nature to contribute to people’s quality of life. This decline is caused by direct and indirect anthropogenic drivers, and its causes and effects are distributed unevenly. Increased extraction from lower-income countries and increased consumption in higher-income countries has led to unequal effects on people and nature, which increase inequality and will have long-term social and ecological costs. The authors reported that natural ecosystems had declined by 47%, 25% of species were threatened with extinction, and that species abundance and mammalian species biomass had declined by 23% and 82%, respectively. Consequently, poor progress had been made in meeting internationally agreed biodiversity goals, including the Aichi Targets. Direct drivers of these changes include land-use and sea-use change, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species. Indirect drivers of change are demographic, sociocultural, economic or technological, or linked to institutions, governance, conflicts and epidemics. These indirect drivers underpin direct drivers, and the two interact with each other to exacerbate their effects on biodiversity.
