Biodiversity is something really, really, important. For you, for your kids and for their kids.
In a nutshell biodiversity is all the variety of life that can be found on Earth.
There's three levels of biodiversity: genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity. All equally important.
A high level of diversity is usually seen to be best - as it supports human needs like food, nutrition, medicines and pharmaceuticals. As well as our environment.
But instead of maintaining diversity, we're losing it.
And food production is the main culprit.
Industrial food production... eat now, pay later
Food.
A business that’s busy consuming itself.
Today's food system is designed to drive demand. More burgers, more soya lattes, more fried chicken.
This leads to two things: more land converted to agriculture and more intensive use of the land. Both unsustainable.
Consider this: the average person in the UK gets almost 60% of their calories from ultra-processed foods.
And the only way to supply those calories is to mass produce them.
So farming needs to become more and more industrial. And the best way to win at industrial farming is to focus on just a few – or even just one – high-output crop or animal.
And then farm it intensely.
Which is why we're now at the stage where 75 percent of the world's food comes from just 12 plants and five species of animal.
In fact, nearly 70 percent of the world's agricultural land grows a measly nine crops: sugar cane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava.
But raising a single crop has its drawbacks. It ups the risk of disease and pest outbreaks. And wreaks havoc with the environment.
Because, as farming intensity increases, habitat diversity decreases - and biodiversity generally decreases too. Which, in turn, leads to lower yields.
So we enter a vicious circle.
The UK already uses the equivalent of 154,000 football pitches of agricultural land to produce sugar beet. British Sugar, the monopoly company controlling the UK sugar industry, plans to increase production of refined sugar by 50%.
We’re torching whole libraries, full of genetic code
First thing to go is genetic diversity.
But it's not just wildlife that bears the losses – crops and farm animals do too.
In developed countries, 90 percent of cattle belong to just six breeds, while over 20 percent of the remainder are at risk of extinction. In fact, six breeds are lost each and every month. So their genes – and the codes they contain – are lost forever.
For crops it's the same story. Since the 1900's some 75 percent of agricultural plant genetic diversity has been lost, as farmers, worldwide, abandon local varieties and plant genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties instead.
Worryingly, this loss of crop diversity actually increases the risk of further declining yields.
Wildlife... in a one sided fight for space and resources
The simple fact is: the production of crops and livestock – which occupies 50 percent of the global habitable land surface – is a major driver of biodiversity loss.
It's led to a loss of diversity and a fragmentation of natural habitats. While the few habitats that survive continue to degrade and diminish.
So, it's no surprise that, since 1970 the population sizes of wild mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have declined by an estimated average of 68 per cent.
And, as the population of a species gets smaller, its risk of extinction gets bigger.
Today, instead of wild animals, a tiny number of farmed animal species (mainly cows and pigs) dominate the global “mammal biomass".
In fact, cattle, sheep and pigs now account for 60 percent of all mammal species by mass, compared to just 4 percent for wild mammals and 36 per cent for humans.
Or, to put it another way, farm animals are about 30 times the living mass of all earth’s wild mammals combined.
This leaves undomesticated animals to compete for any remaining space and its resources.
It's, clearly, a very unequal fight.
And it’s no wonder they're losing out.
In a sample of 177 species of large mammals most lost more than 80% of their geographic range in the last century.
This helps to explain why biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history, and perhaps as fast as during any mass extinction.
Worryingly, biodiversity loss also contributes to climate change.
Extinction is no longer “a risk”
Over the past 50 years the planet's biodiversity has taken a hammering. And the next phase is extinction.
In fact, the global rate of species extinction now runs, at a minimum of tens – and possibly hundreds of times – higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years.
Already a quarter of all species in most animal and plant groups are under threat from extinction.
And, the United Nations inform us, around 1 million more species face extinction within decades.
The mass extinction, now underway, is the most serious environmental threat to civilization we face.
Because, when a species is lost, all its unique genetic code... its relationships with other species... its physical characteristics... and its behaviours are lost. Forever.
And this sets off a cascade effect.
Because each species is just a single link in an ecosystem. And, as one species disappears, other species they're linked to start to disappear too.
Luckily, there could be a solution
The biggest wins for biodiversity will happen when we preserve – or restore – whole ecosystems.
With few exceptions this'll require large areas of land to either be “managed for nature”, or left to re-wild. Because the bigger the animal the more land they'll need to maintain a sustainable population.
The journey starts with what the EU Commission calls “The Factory of Life” … soil.
Soils are a vital component of ecosystems for lots of reasons. For a start, the vast majority of plants grow in soil. And it's soil that delivers the nutrients plants need. The plants then pass those nutrients on to animals and ultimately to us.
Soil's also a vast genetic repository.
It's home to over 11 million species of organisms – that's a quarter of all living species on earth. Consider this: just a single gram of soil – about a quarter of a teaspoon – can contain up to one billion bacteria cells. All of them working for us.
So, the long and the short of it is, to create a food system that supports biodiversity we'll need to three things.
Alter our diets (ie. eat less meat)... create space for biodiversity... and adapt how we farm.
We support that.
SOURCES
The factory of life – Why soil biodiversity is so important
European Commission
2010
The rise and fall of monoculture farming
Horizon, The EU Research & Innovation Magazine
Allison Balogh – 13 December 2021
Reducing the environmental and biodiversity impacts of agriculture
UK Parliament
Jonathan Wentworth – 29 April 2021
Regenerative organic agriculture and the soil carbon solution
Rodale Institute
Jeff Moyer, Andrew Smith, PhD, Yichao Rui, PhD, Jennifer Hayden, PhD – September 2020
Ultra-processed foods and excessive free sugar intake in the UK: a nationally representative cross-sectional study
British Medical Association Journals
Fernanda Rauber, Maria Laura da Costa Louzada, Euridice Martinez Steele, Leandro F M de Rezende, Christopher Millett, Carlos A Monteiro, Renata B Levy October 2019
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Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Tim G. Benton, Carling Bieg, Helen Harwatt, Roshan Pudasaini and Laura Wellesley – February 2021
Back to the land: rethinking our approach to soil
Campaign to Protect Rural England
Graeme Willis – December 2018
Biodiversity in farming
European Court of Auditors
May 2019
Soil biodiversity
NSW Department of Planning and Environment
6 July 2018
Livestock and landscapes
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
2012
What is happening to agrobiodiversity
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter H. Raven – 1 June 2020