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https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/data/biodiversity-indicators/about-the-biodiversity-intactness-index/using-the-biodiversity-intactness-index.html https://www.
by iicc 5y ago
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/data/biodiversity-indicators/about-the-biodiversity-intactness-index/using-the-biodiversity-intactness-index.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/data/biodiversity-indicato...
>'The UK is one of the most depleted countries in the world in terms of biodiversity. The Natural History Museum has calculated an index of biodiversity intactness. Using this measure of the health of our natural environment, we rank 189th in the world, and we are bottom of the G7 countries. In the past 10 years, 41% of our bird species have decreased and 15% of our wildlife is threatened with extinction.
>'The dreadful state of our nature is at least in part a result of living in a densely populated country in which nearly three-quarters of our land is used for farming or the built environment. We have simply squeezed nature out of its home.'
>Lord Krebs, zoologist and Member of the House of Lords, in the debate on the Environment Bill, 10 June 2021
It's great that the Thames is improving, and the recent stuff about the wild bees is amazing, but these stories lack the wider context.
- refurb 5y agoThere are 196 countries and this study says the UK is ranked 189th? Have they visited developing countries? This an absurd statement.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoYou (I'll paraphrase): "They did a study and my assumptions have been violated, so I'm going to say it's absurd!" Obviously it depends on what things they measured. If it's "Number of people named Cumberbatch" the UK would probably be ranked no. 1, so they could've also designed a study to make the UK look bad. But if I can guess, I don't think you read the study and its conclusions.
- refurb 5y agoWhen a study arrives an absurd conclusion then yes I’m happy to dismiss it.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoWell, I guess you can feel free to know what you know, and dismiss anything that goes against your beliefs before even examining their arguments. That's the way to remain smart! /s
- BoxOfRain 5y agoBritain was the first country to industrialise, it'd be surprising if it wasn't so low.
- vanderZwan 5y agoYou're honestly surprised that countries that haven't gone through full industrialization have more untouched nature? That countries that mostly depend on tourism from people who want to see unspoiled nature for their economies do better in this score than the UK?
- IanCal 5y agoI would expect that more developed countries would have had greater impacts on their biodiversity due to the development itself. Would you have expected it the other way around?
- refurb 5y agoDeveloped countries tend to have a far smaller footprint from industrialization per unit of output than developing countries. When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity even with minimal industrialization.
- p1esk 5y agoWhen your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity I’d expect the opposite.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago> When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity Yes, but enough about the UK 1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/17/rivers-in-england-fail-pollution-tests-due-to-sewage-and-chemicals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/17/rivers-i...
- refurb 5y agoHaha… no. Failed tests is nowhere close to “so much shit nothing can survive”. Goes to show how out of touch that metric is.
- causi 5y agoIt's a measure of "biodiversity intactness", not human habitability. A country that's been industrialized for hundreds of years will have a lower rating than one that was hunter-gatherer until a century ago.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoNo, honestly it matches what I've seen. Britain is painfully deforested. Yes, "developing" countries have more litter, but they are also less "developed" -- by which we really mean, the land has not all been converted to farms and cities and industrial buildings and pavement. Britain is not Mordor, but the shortage of trees and animals is real. Too much of it is an empty green lawn. Whereas really it should be a temperate rainforest, fuelled by the Gulf Stream. It is a wet, lush, and fertile place. It just needs to regrow.
- InitialLastName 5y ago> Britain is not Mordor, but the shortage of trees and animals is real. Too much of it is an empty green lawn. Ahem, I believe industrial Britain is meant to be Isengard. Edit:Format
- fennecfoxen 5y agoWhat?! No. Isengard is somewhere in Central Europe. Britain is the Shire, and Bree. Industrial Britain is the Shire after Frodo gets back, the part the movie skipped (elevating the modern Iraq War veterans experience of “I am the one who changed and don’t belong anymore” over the WWII veterans experience of “even the place I love changed”.)
- toyg 5y agoIsengard is France, with Orthanc being Paris - at the time of writing, the cultural centre of Europe, a shining metropolis full to the brink with earnest intellectuals, and still completely unable to resist turning into the Vichy Regime.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoDeveloping countries tends to have a less damaged wilder environment than the UK and Europe, which are almost 100% man-made at this point: Everything has been planted for humans' benefits and any large wide animal that did not fit in killed off. We actually want to help developing countries to develop without ending like Europe.
- globular-toast 5y ago> Have they visited developing countries? Have you? Most places in the world have huge swathes of wilderness. Britain has close to none. It's not so much about how "bad" the human populated places are. It's about how much space is left for the rest of nature.
- open-source-ux 5y agoI recently heard some startling facts about forest cover in the UK. (Forest cover is the amount of forest covering the land.) The UK has only approximately 13% forest cover. In Europe, only Denmark and Netherlands have similarly low coverage. These facts came from a BBC Radio 4 programme called More or Less [1] In France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, approximately one third of the land is covered in forests. Finland has an impressive 73% forest cover. Forest cover has always been small in the UK for the past few hundred years. The Industrial Revolution was not the cause of the small forest cover in the UK. An estimate from the Forest Commission (a UK government department) is that forest cover in England in the 1100s was only about 15%. After World War I, it dipped to its lowest point - 5%. It's currently about 13% in England (similar in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Why is forest cover so small in the UK? About 5000 years ago, people started cutting down forests to use the land for agricultural use. Even in Roman times, Britain had a reputation for growing lots of produce. One of the reasons that other European countries have retained greater forest cover is because they have mountain ranges which makes it much harder to convert that land into agricultural use. [1] More or Less: Behind the Stats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09x66st https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09x66st (The discussion on forest cover starts approximately at the 24-minute mark.) --- Edited to add: The BBC radio programme cites it's source for statistics on forest cover as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Their 2020 Global Forest Resources Assessment is another source of fascinating stats: - Forests cover nearly 1/3 of land globally - More than half (54 percent) of the world’s forests are in only five countries: the Russian Federation (20%), Brazil (12%), Canada (9%), the USA (8%) and China (5%) - Rest of the world makes up the rest (46%) Link: https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/2020/en/ https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/2020/en/
- an9n 5y agoThis is one of the reasons I am fiercely anti-immigration to the UK: there simply is not enough space left to accomodate more people here without a. smashing the remain biodiversity to pieces b. drastic impacts on the current human population's quality of life, as we are herded into pod cities to preserve the sad excuse for nature that's left or c. outright genocide, which sadly doesn't look that far away to me these days. Anyone that's pro-immigation needs to tell us which it will be. Personally I'm already planning to leave this country for good due to the overcrowding. I - like I suspect the majority of people in the country - never voted for mass migration, and indeed, there's clearly a globalist agenda that seeks to prevent the electorate being given a vote on this at all costs (see how completely insane they went over Brexit...). It's simply not a civilised way to live and not something I have any intention whatsoever of inflicting on my offspring.
- quesera 5y agoYou've stated your preexisting conclusions with great drama, but you have not related them back to the topic at hand convincingly.
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoIndeed. Insofar as the presence of humanity is the enemy of biodiversity, the problem is suburban sprawl and excessive rural development, and the answer is urban density. Immigration is only a facet of that larger paradigm.
- an9n 5y ago> the answer is urban density i.e. live in the pod?
- Eric_WVGG 5y agohah. I mean, I would have loved to try pod-living in my late teens or early twenties, sounds better than roommates. They say that if everyone lived like a New Yorker, you could fit the world population in Texas. I imagine that if everyone in the UK lived like a Londoner, you could fit the non-London population in a London 2? But before you come back and say "yeah well not everyone wants to be an urban hipster" and this turns into an "urban elite" conversation, have you ever thought about the flip side of that, a sense of "rural elite"? Land is limited. Space is limited. There's something odd about people with all the property in the world saying "this is all mine, keep everyone else out, there's not enough to go around, mine." And they don't have as much space as the average citizen, they have THE MOST SPACE. Like, if this isn't a race or nationalism thing, would [parent] be cool with a mass exodus of Londoners who suddenly developed a taste for, I dunno, fox hunting or whatever? If not, why? At any rate: living in the country and worrying about immigrants is ridiculous. They come to the cities to look for work, everyone knows that. Regarding biodiversity, I wouldn't support any kind of program that forced people to move to pods in the city, but we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.
- simonswords82 5y agoYeah the industrial revolution kicked the environment hard in the nuts.
- bsder 5y agoThis even predates the industrial revolution. Part of the reason why English joinery was so advanced is that they cut down all the trees everywhere. Consequently, they were left with tiny trees which grew quickly and had to make up for that with advanced joinery. As for the Thames, that was terrible even as far back as Shakespeare (presumably even further back than that).
- brudgers 5y agoIn a global context, English laws and customs also form the basis of land and resources policy for the entire Australian continent as well as most of North America, the Indian sub-continent and non-trivial portions of the African continent.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoWhen I read the title of the post, I knew right away that the top comment would be a comment about how bad things are. Top 3 comments, currently. It's almost like anything optimistic is a threat that needs to be immediately dealt with.