Erik StokstadA major report card on the state of biodiversity gives failing grades to the world’s nations. The United Nations’s Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, released this week, concludes that the world has not met ambitious targets set 10 years ago to protect nature. “The warning lights are flashing.
We have to recognize that we’re in a planetary emergency," Andy Purvis, a biodiversity researcher at the Natural History Museum said in a statement.“We are losing biodiversity and that has very real consequences to people’s health, prosperity, and well-being,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved in the report.There is still time to halt—and even reverse—the loss of biodiversity,.