As the cliff edge looms, governments hit the accelerator

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Ensuring the stability of society and the wellbeing of its members means ensuring that the ecosystems that support us are in good shape — and they are not.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 June 2025

701 words

Some may consider Prime Minister Mark Carney to be an economic guru but he is either ignorant of or chooses to ignore two fundamental truths in his rush to build the nation by growing the economy.

First, as the World Wide Fund for Nature eloquently put it in 2014, “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.” Second, as Kenneth Boulding – a former President of both the American Economic Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science – stated way back in 1973: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

So ensuring the stability of society and the wellbeing of its members means ensuring that the ecosystems that support us are in good shape – and they are not. A couple of centuries of industrialism, and 80 years of massive and rapid economic growth since the Second World War – referred to as ‘The Great Acceleration’ – have taken their toll, pushing us close to the cliff edge.

Let me be clear what I mean by the cliff edge. Earth scientists have just concluded that we have crossed the seventh of nine planetary boundaries they have identified. The latest is ocean acidification, sometimes called ‘osteoporosis of the sea’ because it thins the shells of calcifying species such as corals, oysters, mussels, clams, and pteropods (tiny sea snails). It has also been called  the ‘evil twin’ of climate change because it too is largely the result of carbon dioxide emissions.

In fact, a study published this month in Global Change Biology finds, based on revised and updated models, that the entire surface ocean crossed that boundary in 2000. As a result there are “significant declines in suitable habitats for important calcifying species”, particularly in the polar regions.

Add to that recent reports on catastrophic declines in insect species, even in protected forest areas, and in the birds, frogs, lizards and other species that eat them. An article in the Guardian in June quotes a prominent US entomologist, David Wagner, who documents insects all over the USA. Speaking of a recent trip to Texas  he said “There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of”, adding “I want to do what I can with my last decade to chronicle the last days for many of these creatures.”

Climate change underlies both ocean acidification and insect declines – and climate change is rapidly worsening. We see the evidence of this in Canada, with the early arrival of wildfires and extreme heat events in June this year. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 ppm for the first time in some 30 million years. A recent article on indicators of global climate change found human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate in the past decade, due to “greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high” this decade “as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling”.

And yet, Carney and his government ignore all this, egged on by corporate spin-masters who are using Trump’s dangerous actions as cover to push for the reversal of health and environmental protections and respect for the rights of Indigenous people in the name of ‘nation-building’.

The evidence of Carney’s ignorance – or ignore-ance – is clear in the mandate letter he gave to his Cabinet on May 21st. Not only is the environment not one of the seven priorities for the government, there is not a single use of the word ‘environment’ anywhere in this letter, and only a passing reference to climate change right at the end: “We will fight climate change”. Big hairy deal!

Nor is there any reference to wellbeing or quality of life in the Mandate letter, which is quite ironic, given that Carney has established a new Cabinet Committee on quality of life and wellbeing. Yet both are threatened by further harm to the Earth’s natural systems, and by riding roughshod over Indigenous peoples’ rights and health and environmental protections.

The unseemly rush to further exploit nature, and especially to make Canada a conventional energy superpower, merely accelerates us towards the cliff edge.

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Later is too late to restore nature

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

Dr. Trevor Hancock

15 October 2024

697 words

Tomorrow – October 21st – sees the opening of COP16 – the 16th UN Biodiversity Conference in Cali, Colombia. It is the first of three UN conferences this Fall that are addressing individually the three components of what the UN calls the ‘triple planetary crisis’ of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

COP16 will be followed in short succession by the 29th UN Conference on Climate Change, which takes place in Baku, Azerbaijan from November 11th to 21st and then the final round of negotiations on a global plastics treaty – plastic being a key pollutant, although far from the only one – in Busan, South Korea from November 25th to December 1st.

These three issues are also three of the nine components of the Planetary Boundaries model I discussed last week; we have crossed the boundary for all three, and the trend is worsening for all three. Moreover, they don’t operate in isolation, but interact in ways that usually make things worse. Biodiversity loss, for example, is driven by five main factors, according to a landmark 2019 UN report, two of which are climate change and pollution.

While climate change is often seen as the main – and sometimes, the only – threat, biodiversity loss is really fundamental. As Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, the President for COP16, noted in an interview with John Woodside in Canada’s National Observer: “If nature collapses, communities and people will also collapse. Society will collapse.”

Troublingly, nature is getting closer to collapsing. That same 2019 report found that “around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.” And just this past week, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) released the latest Living Planet Report, sub-titled ‘A System in Peril’.

The report uses the Living Planet Index, which is based on a count of the population size for almost 35,000 routinely monitored populations representing 5,495 vertebrate species – amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. While it is only a portion of overall biodiversity, it is an important one, in part because of its longevity. The Index covers a 50-year period from 1970 – 2020 and has been trending steadily downwards throughout that time.

Thus while the result this year is disturbing, it is hardly surprising: “the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73 percent”, the WWF reports – so nearly three-quarters of those vertebrate populations have gone in just 50 years! “Nature”, the report bluntly states, “is disappearing at an alarming rate.”

But that is the global average; it is much worse in some regions and among some ecosystems. Freshwater vertebrate populations – think fish, reptiles and amphibians – “have suffered the heaviest declines, falling by 85 percent”, while “the fastest declines have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean – a concerning 95 percent decline – followed by Africa (76 percent).”

By comparison, North America seemingly fares well, with ‘only’ a 39 percent decline, as does Europe and Central Asia (35 percent down). However, the authors caution, that is misleading because “large-scale impacts on nature were already apparent before 1970”, which is when the Index begins.

The authors caution us that population declines of this scale may compromise the resilience of ecosystems, threatening their functioning, which in turn “undermines the benefits that ecosystems provide to people.” And they warn that “a number of tipping points [substantial, often abrupt and potentially irreversible changes] are highly likely if current trends . . . continue, with potentially catastrophic consequences” for both societies and the Earth’s living systems.

As do a number of recent reports, the WWF concludes that to restore resilience, balance and vitality to the natural systems that are our life support systems, we need not just a transition but transformative change, in particular in “our food, energy and finance systems.”

This will not be easy, but the longer we put off the necessary transformations, the steeper the price we will have to pay in health, social and economic terms. Indeed, the WWF believes that “It is no exaggeration to say that what happens in the next five years will determine the future of life on Earth.”

As the slogan for the recent Seniors Climate Action Day put it, ‘Later is too late!’

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy