That’s my summary (in my own words, not theirs) of this paper from Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

This is not a paper about solutions. One thing they suggest is “for the scientific community to be more vocal”. I’m not sure. We need well-trained, well-funded scientists to do good science while talking amongst themselves, and then I think we need good science and risk communicators (some of whom might be scientists, but especially journalists and teachers and other types of people who write and speak in public, I think), along with engineers and technologists and economists and many other specialists (and generalists!) to help get through to our political and bureaucratic decision makers on the best courses of action. Facts and evidence don’t just speak for themselves, unfortunately. I certainly agree with the authors of this paper that we are failing to get through.

I’m always looking for that elevator pitch about why Uncle Lou (a fictional hard-headed relative, I don’t actually have an Uncle Lou) should care about biodiversity. Here is their attempt:

With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined. These include inter alia reduced carbon sequestration (Heath et al., 2005; Lal, 2008), reduced pollination (Potts et al., 2016), soil degradation (Lal, 2015), poorer water and air quality (Smith et al., 2013), more frequent and intense flooding (Bradshaw et al., 2007; Hinkel et al., 2014) and fires (Boer et al., 2020; Bowman et al., 2020), and compromised human health (Díaz et al., 2006; Bradshaw et al., 2019). As telling indicators of how much biomass humanity has transferred from natural ecosystems to our own use, of the estimated 0.17 Gt of living biomass of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth today, most is represented by livestock (59%) and human beings (36%)—only ~5% of this total biomass is made up by wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians (Bar-On et al., 2018). As of 2020, the overall material output of human endeavor exceeds the sum of all living biomass on Earth (Elhacham et al., 2020).

Frontiers in Conservation Science

I don’t think this paragraph will convince Uncle Lou. I think the message for the public is one where floods and fires threaten the value of their homes, and the future of the food supply we have taken for granted over the last century or so comes into doubt. The loss of natural ecosystems and animals is an epic tragedy to some, me included, but not to Uncle Lou down at the racetrack betting on the ponies (I’m not sure exactly who this character is I’ve just created, maybe we can interview him sometime and find out).