Biodiversity Loss and Resource Scarcity

The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), estimated that around one million animal and plant species face extinction, many within decades, a rate of loss tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past ten million years, a situation increasingly described as a "sixth mass extinction" by comparison with the five previous mass extinctions documented in the fossil record. The report identified habitat loss and land-use change as the largest single driver, followed by direct exploitation of species, climate change, pollution, and the spread of invasive species, and noted that these pressures are increasingly interacting and reinforcing one another.