An MEP has warned that humans are mistreating the earth and that the resultant loss of biodiversity is posing an unprecedented threat to our own existence. Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on biodiversity, has said, “We consider ourselves the guardians of planet earth, but we are responsible for an extinction rate that has not been seen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”

The rapid rate at which humans are destroying species and habitats is unprecedented, and difficult to reverse once the process has begun. In the UK there are measures being undertaken to prevent this, including farmers and conservationists in the East of England working together to restore wetlands and secure habitats.

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Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy said there is a growing awareness that humans must begin to live with nature, and that the rate of destruction is unsustainable. He said economists from  institutions including the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and Deutsche Bank had all pointed to the financial impact biodiversity loss is already having on land industries and countries, not to mention the effect on culture, health and wellbeing.

Recently, scientists and economists have begun to ascribe monetary values to the ‘ecosystem services’ on which humans are reliant, though as a panel of experts discussing the topic at the Natural History Museum last week agreed, this commodification drastically undervalues nature’s worth; even so, an estimated $2-4.5 trillion of natural capital is lost each year from the World.

Mr Gerbrandy said, “This is not just a matter of morality. Our human race can simply not survive without all the services nature provides us with. Food, clean air, clean water and fertile soil - we can thank only nature for all of this.”

Political will needed to halt biodiversity loss

With the Rio+20 climate talks fast approaching a great deal of pressure is on the world’s leaders to cooperate and act on biodiversity loss and climate change. Mr Gerbrandy stated, “It is not terribly difficult to stop the loss of biodiversity. Most important of all is the political will to act. Nice words are not enough. We have to integrate biodiversity in all other policy fields - like agriculture, fisheries, development and trade policy.”

The Dutch MEP said that, as 50 per cent of land in Europe is given over to agricultural use, farming is a key area on which efforts to preserve biodiversity in Europe should focus. Claiming that past advances in farming had resulted in more food being produced at the cost of creating “biological deserts,” he said that measures are already being undertaken that are reducing farmers’ impact on the land, but that more could and should be done as a matter of course.  He said, “Nature cannot survive without using this land. With relatively simple measures like using fewer pesticides, planting flowers along the fields and using fewer fertilisers - huge gains could be made.”

Mr Gerbrandy called for an end to “free riders, making money by destroying nature and sending a bill to society at large,” claiming that there is a pressing need for factoring nature into production costs to prevent its exploitation.

Experts at the Natural History Museum acknowledged that not enough is currently known about the extent to which humans are reliant on the range of biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ the planet provides, though Pavan Sukhdev, a project leader on TEEB, a major study on biodiversity, said, “You cannot neglect these losses, simply because things that come to you from nature are free; just because its is free does not mean it’s worth something, it is. The economic scale of the losses we are seeing these days is staggering.”

Mr Sukhdev warned that, at the current rate, humans will destroy an area of forest the size of Australia by 2050, though Mr Gerbrandy is promoting an idea which would see more European land given over to conservation uses. The MEP suggests that wildlife parks, akin to the Serengeti in Africa and Yellowstone national Park in the United States should be created in Europe, on large areas of land which is poorly suited to agriculture and where, if farming does exist, farmers are kept in place through a reliance on subsidies.

Mr Gerbrandy said, these areas are already in the process of being abandoned by farmers and other inhabitants and that transforming them into wildlife parks would benefit biodiversity and provide therapeutic leisure opportunities for Europe’s increasingly urban population. 

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