Why does humanity fail to recognize and respond adequately to the biodiversity crisis
In his article (here), the Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Robert Nasi, speaks of alarming numbers that attest to the crisis of the accelerated loss of the diversity of life, with the extinction of several species since the 70s. Since its inception, wildlife populations have plummeted by 73 percent, with more than a million species at risk and 44 percent of coral reefs, nurseries in the ocean, threatened.
And as much as data like this is often disclosed, most people are not sensitized to this serious crisis, nor where it is taking us. It is very interesting to know what the author identifies as three powerful psychological biases that explain this dangerous disconnect between reality and perception. The first bias is the mobile baseline syndrome, a concept developed by scientist Daniel Pauly in 1995: each generation accepts progressively degraded environments as a normal reference, creating what environmental psychologist Peter Kahn Jr. calls “generational environmental amnesia”. Children today grow up believing that today’s impoverished natural world represents normalcy.
The second is creeping normalcy, which makes gradual changes invisible until they culminate in a crisis. Nasi brings the 2023-2024 global coral bleaching event, which affected 84% of terrestrial reefs – the most extensive on record. Prior to 1990, this massive bleaching never occurred; It now happens every 2-3 years, with each increase in frequency becoming the new normal.
The third bias, according to Nasi, is that of categorical thinking, which simplifies complex ecological problems into inadequate mental categories. The Amazon, for example, is treated as a single system, ignoring that 31% of the eastern region is already lost while western areas remain intact.
Nasi cites the historic collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery in 1992 as an archetypal example of these biases. Populations fell to 1 percent of historical levels, but each generation of fisheries scientists accepted the stocks of their time as the normal baseline, ignoring the historical context.
The author points out that freshwater ecosystems have collapsed dramatically, declining by 85% since 1970, but this incremental process has remained invisible to the public and policymakers. Twenty-one species were declared extinct in 2023 in the United States, including eight Hawaiian honeybird birds, illustrating how gradual decline normalizes over generations.
Another conclusion in Nasi’s article was that the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Reports exemplify this distortion: they consistently rank biodiversity loss among the top long-term risks, but never as an immediate threat. Our mind struggles to process gradual, complex, and distributed threats that don’t fit familiar patterns of catastrophe.
Finally, Nasi emphasizes that the next five years are decisive, with multiple ecosystems approaching irreversible tipping points and points out that the 2024 IPBES Nexus Assessment (here) recognizes that addressing biodiversity, climate, water, food, and health crises in isolation is ineffective. These issues, in his view, require integrated approaches that could generate $10 trillion in benefits by 2030.
Understanding these cognitive blind spots represents our best chance of overcoming them once we recognize how our minds distort environmental perception, he concludes. Thus, Nasi thinks that we can develop effective strategies to face what is possibly, according to him, humanity’s greatest failure of perception.
This analysis underscores the fundamental importance of nature conservation projects, such as the Rio Cautário Extractive Reserve (here), which emerge as our main tool for reversing devastating trends, protecting remaining ecosystems, and restoring those lost, ensuring that the rich diversity of terrestrial life can be preserved for future generations.
Original article in Portuguese HERE
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