UNIVERSAL BIODIVERSITY LOSS!

According to a recent paper in Nature[1], human activity is leading to biodiversity losses in all ecosystems on our planet. This is the conclusion from a synthesis of over 2,000 studies over nearly 100,000 sites. The authors “compiled 2,133 publications covering 97,783 impacted and reference sites, creating an unparallelled dataset of 3,667 independent comparisons of biodiversity impacts across all main organismal groups, habitats and the five most predominant human pressures”. It may seem strange, perverse even, that the adverse impacts of human activity across the Earth are still not universally accepted and are even denied. Trump does not help and neither do our UK government’s intentions to encourage more and more development, even on the Green Belt, nor does telling developers they need not worry about bats and newts and dumbing down the wildlife protection legislation!  Our wildlife laws exist to protect biodiversity, not to give developers consent to destroy species and habitats. What does it take to make politicians understand what is blatantly obvious to anyone with even the most ephemeral knowledge of ecology and natural history?

The Nature paper, which the authors hope will be a benchmark for conservation strategies and considered all biota (animals, plants, fungi, microbes), reveals that human pressures change ecological community composition and reduce local biological diversity in terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems worldwide. Previously, there has never been such an attempt to combine data from so many biodiversity research studies of human impact across the planet and on all groups of wildlife. The results mean we can now make general statements about the overall worldwide  impacts of human activity on biodiversity with more confidence.

This is an exhaustive analysis that confirms the devastating and unprecedented impact of human beings on nature. Impacts of habitat change, direct resource exploitation (e.g. fishing & hunting), climate change, invasive species and pollution were examined. The number of species at sites affected by humans was nearly twenty percent fewer than those without human impact. Herpetofauna and mammals suffered especially badly the researchers found and, because the population numbers of these larger taxa tend to be smaller or less mobile than other groups, this increases their risk of extinction.

Betts Ecology will do all we can to protect and increase biodiversity on the sites we manage. We monitor biodiversity status regularly and feed the results into our site work and habitat management, creation and positive ecological interventions. If you have an MP who supports the idea that developers should be able to disregard wildlife and the legislation protecting biodiversity, please write to them and object in the strongest possible terms. It is going through parliament now!

[1] Keck, F., Peller, T., Alther, R. et al. The global human impact on biodiversity. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08752-2. This is an open access paper which you can download as a PDF.