The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released a report on Monday showing that the global wildlife population dropped by an astounding 52 percent between 1970 and 2010. This finding implied that the overall health of the planet is also dwindling as climate change disrupts the ecosystem and humans are consuming more than the available resources.
According to the 2014 Living Planet Report of the international environmental organization, most of the decline in the populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish was observed in poor countries as high-income countries acquire resources from them. Aside from the human contribution, climate change also disrupted the ecosystems resulting to increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere, degradation of lands, rivers and oceans due to high concentrations of nitrogen and scarcity in water supply.
"We're gradually destroying our planet's ability to support our way of life," Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF, said in a press release. "But we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and its time we started acting within those limits."
Researchers looked at the trends in populations of more than 10,000 species, human consumption of goods and greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of natural resources. The analysis revealed the amount of biodiversity loss in the past 40 years - 39 percent for land animals, 39 percent for marine animals and 76 percent for freshwater animals.
The team attributed the decline to the increased demand of goods of high-income countries, explaining that there are not enough resources to accommodate those needs. It also seemed that the high-income countries get these resources mainly from low-income countries as they are able to increase their biodiversity by 10 percent, a 58 percent decline. Some of the low-income countries mentioned in the report include India, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses," said Keya Chatterjee, WWF's senior director of footprint. "In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion."
