As experts for decades have warned, we have not done nearly enough to combat climate change and we are starting to see the devastating effects of a warming planet. And the first victims of these effects are the animals! This is especially tragic because even the mere existence of these creatures is a massive part of what keeps our earth's ecology balanced to keep our world habitable. As we abuse the earth with overdevelopment, deforestation, air, water, and soil pollution, and unsustainable agricultural practices, we are burying masses of wildlife beneath our transgressions. We are disrupting the circle of life, and if we take things too far, our planet will respond by becoming totally unlivable.
According to the Living Planet Report 2020 provided by World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, worldwide animal populations have plummeted 68% on average since 1970. Over half the world's animals, dead. And in areas closest to the equator like the tropical Americas, which experience global warming to the extreme, animal communities shrank by closer to 94%.
That is nearly 100%. Once these animals are lost, they are lost forever, and with them the chain of events that keep our environment hospitable to life itself. Sign the petition to implore the United Nations to create a task force specific to the tropical Americas that would prop up conservation efforts, restrictions on habitat decimation, and sustainable solutions to the ticking time bomb that is factory farming!
Make no mistake -- it is human action that has caused this mass death. The Living Planet Report 2020 does not skirt around the point. We flatten forests, 'the earth's lungs,' to make way for our own masses of machinery, farms, or waste. The animals that once called those forests home perish. We overuse freshwater resources for processing and farming, paying no mind to conservation, leaving lake and river beds dry or polluted. The organisms we stole from shrivel and die. We pollute the air, we overfish, we kill animals at unnecessarily high rates, our actions cause global temperatures to rise, and now we are seeing patterns of mass death in wildlife. And somehow, many of us are fooling ourselves into believing we won't be next.
But we will be. The scientists behind this report, which has been labeled "uncharacteristically bold and direct," are desperate to get through to us. The report literally says, "biodiversity keeps us alive, so we need to ensure that we stop destroying it." Let's do just that.
The United Nations is a vital resource, bringing nations together since, at the end of the day, we are one big global community. Larger, wealthier countries need to be held responsible for the plights of smaller nations for two main reasons. One: these countries, like the United States, are often wealthier and more powerful because they exploit smaller countries that cannot defend or support themselves. And two: the bigger players contribute far more to climate change through industry, emissions, and pollutants; they should have a proportionate contribution to also fighting climate change. The tropical Americas experiencing an almost 100% loss of biodiversity is not entirely, or even mostly, their fault. They need aid in the form of the UN redistributing resources.
Sign the petition and ask the UN to form a special task force to address the contributing factors to an almost 100% decrease in animal populations in the tropical Americas. We need global solutions for the world's animals survival, now!
