Most damaging of all, of course, has been COVID-19 – a consequence of our increasingly close contact with hitherto undisturbed ecosystems. The pandemic has revealed the massive and unpredictable interconnectedness between natural environments and global economies.

Damage to ecosystems across the world, and the resulting loss of biodiversity, has received less attention than other sustainability challenges – climate change risks, pollutants, poverty and conflict. Yet the biodiversity crisis is a direct risk to humankind. It is hard to quantify given the heterogeneity of ecosystems, and it is very hard to solve. However, what is certain is that we have not found a way to continue to grow and develop that interacts with the natural world in a sustainable way.

The effects of human action on the natural world are profoundly damaging – deforestation, land degradation, pollution of the water, air and soil, hunting and harvesting, and climate change. And as our population increases and our pursuit of economic growth continues, so the threat intensifies.

We lost an average of 60 percent of the population of vertebrate species between 1970 and 2014.

Three-quarters of the land on earth has been “severely altered” by human actions and two-thirds of the marine environment. Around a million species are at risk if we do nothing.

Our dependence of biodiversity for food, raw materials, medicine and weather makes this trend extremely worrying. Around 70 percent of cancer drugs are organic or derived from natural products, for instance. Production of over 75 percent of global food crop types relies on animal pollination. In economic terms, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates the cost of inaction on ecosystem decline at US$9.87 trillion over 2011-2050.

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