WWF’s Living Planet Report is out. They mean this at least in part as a report card on the UN’s “Decade on Biodiversity”, and the grade is a failing one. A few things caught my eye:

• They have a discussion of “connectivity conservation”, which is intended to reduce fragmentation by connecting protected areas.
• They determined there is an average 69% global decline in abundance of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. The situation in the tropics is much worse than this average.
• Populations of corals and sharks in particular are crashing.
• The “Amazon as we know it” may cease to exist in less than a decade.
• They give an update on the global ecological footprint from the “National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2022 edition”. Maybe I’ll have a more detailed look at this another day. The value they give is in hectares per person and I find it hard to interpret given that the population is not constant. They seem most interested in showing that people in more developed countries are using more than their fair share of the planet’s “biocapacity”. Previously, I understood the unit to be the number of planet Earths needed to sustain humanity’s current level of consumption and waste production long-term. A value less than 1 would be sustainable long term, while a value greater than 1 indicates a drawdown of natural capital, creating a debt that will eventually come due.