<
https://www.sciencealert.com/global-ecosystems-risk-collapsing-decades-before-we-predicted>
'Across the world, rainforests are becoming savanna or farmland, savanna is
drying out and turning into desert, and icy tundra is thawing.
Indeed, scientific studies have now recorded "regime shifts" like these in more
than 20 different types of ecosystems where tipping points have been passed.
Across the world, more than 20 percent of ecosystems are in danger of shifting
or collapsing into something different.
These collapses might happen sooner than you'd think. Humans are already
putting ecosystems under pressure in many different ways – what we refer to as
stresses. And when you combine these stresses with an increase in
climate-driven extreme weather, the date these tipping points are crossed could
be brought forward by as much as 80 percent.
This means an ecosystem collapse that we might previously have expected to
avoid until late this century could happen as soon as in the next few decades.
That's the gloomy conclusion of our latest research, published in
Nature
Sustainability.
Human population growth, increased economic demands, and greenhouse gas
concentrations put pressures on ecosystems and landscapes to supply food and
maintain key services such as clean water. The number of extreme climate events
is also increasing and will only get worse.
What really worries us is that climate extremes could hit already stressed
ecosystems, which in turn transfer new or heightened stresses to some other
ecosystem, and so on. This means one collapsing ecosystem could have a knock-on
effect on neighboring ecosystems through successive feedback loops: an
"ecological doom-loop" scenario, with catastrophic consequences.'
Via Rixty Dixet.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
