Page 75 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

All over the world, however, biodiversity is diminishing at an accelerating rate. The World Wide Fund
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for Nature (WWF)’s Living Planet Report 2018 shows a nearly 60 per cent decline in the abundance of
wildlife populations on average across land, sea and freshwater in less than one generation since 1970.
Figure 28 below summarizes this rapid decline. The report confirmed that ‘the most common threat
to declining populations is loss and/or degradation of natural habitat, but unsustainable exploitation,
invasive species and pollution are also major threats.’ Climate change, specifically, was identified as
the common exacerbator for all these factors.

Figure 28: WWF's summary of global biodiversity loss [xxviii]

Marine biodiversity is particularly at risk. According to UNESCO’s Facts and Figures on marine
biodiversity, as seen in Box 16, by the year 2100, without major intervention, more than half of all
marine species will be at risk of extinction. Over the last 30 years alone, there has been a 40 per
cent loss of coral reefs in oceans across the globe. Coral reefs are one of the foremost indicators of
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