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The world's population numbered nearly 7.6 billion as of mid-2017 and is forecast to peak toward the end of the 21st century at 10–12 billion people. [148] Scholars have argued that population size and growth, along with overconsumption, are significant factors in biodiversity loss and soil degradation.
In the past 50 years, the world's human population has doubled, [20] [12] per capita gross domestic product has quadrupled, [21] and biodiversity has suffered a catastrophic decline. [22] Most notably, tropical forests have been cleared for cattle pastures in South America and for oil-palm plantations in Southeast Asia. [23]
The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2022 found that wildlife populations declined by an average 69% since 1970. [1] [2] [3]The Living Planet Index (LPI) is an indicator of the state of global biological diversity, based on trends in vertebrate populations of species from around the world.
The organisms once living there have either moved elsewhere, or are dead, leading to a decrease in biodiversity and species numbers. [1] [2] Habitat destruction is in fact the leading cause of biodiversity loss and species extinction worldwide. [3]
The total amount of DNA base pairs on Earth, as a possible approximation of global biodiversity, is estimated at 5.0 x 10 37, and weighs 50 billion tonnes. [7] In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon). [8]
Luckily, people have been waking up to the Earth’s biodiversity crisis, which has increased support for the WCN’s work tenfold. Over the years, the organization has enjoyed very concrete success.
The world-average ecological footprint in 2016 was 2.75 global hectares per person (22.6 billion in total). With a world-average biocapacity of 1.63 global hectares (gha) per person (12.2 billion in total), this leads to a global ecological deficit of 1.1 global hectares per person (10.4 billion in total). [1]
For example, a 42 year study of insects in the pristine Breitenbach stream near Schlitz, which is believed to have been unaffected by anthropogenic decline related causes except for climate change, found that while abundance of insects decreased, biodiversity actually rose, especially during the first half of the study. [44]