Five Takeaways from the Latest UN Report on Biodiversity and Why It Matters to All of Us

A UN report released earlier this week warned that we are headed for a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, with up to a million different species of plants and animals facing extinction. The authors of the report concluded that if we don’t do something now to avert this planetary crisis, the loss will have a drastic impact on life as humans know it.

These reports can be overwhelming in nature (no pun intended) and give us the sense that we’re all doomed, so we’ve honed in on five key takeaways from the report that you need to know:

3Industrial Farming is a Major Culprit

Dont eat animals Biodiversity it counts
Photo Credit IG @moderndaylorax

Speaking of food production, the authors of the report identified industrial food production as one of the main threats to biodiversity. Monoculture, the practice of cultivating a plot of land to produce just one crop, requires vast inputs of energy and pesticides to be a viable way of crop production; it’s inherently terrible for biodiversity. And then of course there are the large-scale livestock farms, which produce dangerous levels of methane and nitrous oxide, in addition to carbon dioxide. Furthermore, the expansion of industrial agriculture requires deforestation and large inputs of finite freshwater.

We’ll have to scale back our consumption of all animal products, and opt for truly sustainable products when we do purchase meat and dairy. Farmers will have the tall order of shifting to regenerative practices that can utilize the waste created along the way rather than discard them as toxic pollutants.