What five actions can you take to reverse biodiversity declines?

Browse the following suggestions, which refer particularly to what we as members of the University of Southampton can do to help stop global biodiversity loss. Items in each section are ordered by precedence (e.g., knowledge before activism) or potential to leverage change (e.g., identification with nature empowering engagement with it). To enable further exploration, hyperlinks throughout offer illustration or interpretation of concepts, and key evidence in the scientific literature.

The lists are compiled by Patrick Doncaster as a working document, incorporating suggestions from colleagues and students. Please email me your suggestions for additions (cpd@soton.ac.uk).

Fifty things we can do to mitigate biodiversity loss

As citizens of the world, we can mitigate biodiversity loss in numerous ways, all striving for collective goals related to our integration with nature through sustainable development. Broadly speaking they amount to thinking globally and acting locally, indulging less in consumerism, carnivory, flying and driving, and participating more in appreciating humanity’s place in the natural world, enjoying nature and working collectively to make space for nature. These individual acts of care and benevolence towards the environment also improve our own wellbeing, and they can lead to transformative change in human and planetary health when implemented by multitudes of people. How many do you do already? Do you see any that you would consider pledging to do, or to do more of?

We can appreciate nature’s intrinsic value, by:

• Cherishing the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch of nature’s local and global taxonomic and functional diversity.
• Experiencing the seasonal and regional dynamics of its niches, populations, communities and ecosystems.
• Learning about the diversity of life through description, classification, keying, identification and cataloguing of species.
• Contemplating the vicissitudes of the organic cycle of life through birth, growth and reproduction to death, and the inescapable trade-offs that organisms face along the way.
• Finding meaning in nature from diverse knowledge systems across human societies, including local and indigenous knowledge.
• Identifying with nature through awareness, immersion and commitment, putting humanity before nationalism.
• Tending a wildlife-friendly garden.
• Engaging with our privileged status as custodians of nature, through investment and exchange of knowledge.
• Raising awareness of nature’s local richness, through events such as a BioBlitz.

We can recognise the global reach of nature’s contributions to human wellbeing across all societies and peoples, by:

• Understanding our dependence on nature for regulating the world’s climate, and our global energy-, food- and water-security.
• Valuing the role of nature’s material goods in supporting our daily lives (with food, feed, medicines, energy) and our infrastructures (with wood, thatch, paper, cloth, wool, etc).
• Embracing nature’s non-material gifts, in learning, culture, inspiration, mental health and happiness.
• Cultivating home-grown vegetables.
• Delighting in wild foods.

We can acknowledge the trouble we’re in, by:

• Hearing the scientific evidence of nature’s dangerous decline, in globally degrading natural ecosystems, plummeting abundances of wildlife populations, shrinking gene pools, and at least 1 million species at risk of extinction.
• Informing ourselves of the sweeping changes in the state of wildlife on our own doorstep, with populations of UK priority species halving in abundance since 1970.
• Owning our human history and current role in converting, exploiting, forcing, polluting, and homogenising nature on a global scale.
• Conceding that even protected land is threatened globally by intensive human activity.
• Taking stock of the crippling and cascading effects on ecosystem goods and services of ongoing biodiversity loss caused by unsustainable development, over-exploitation, climate heating, pollution, and introductions of invasive species.
• Caring about the deforestation that is even now changing regional precipitation patterns, the exploitation of rainforests that is destroying cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge, the depletion of ocean biodiversity that is causing fishery collapses with impacts on food security for millions of people.
• Noting how our expanding exploitation of material goods from agricultural land and marine stocks degrades nature’s ability to regulate climate, water, soil, natural hazards and pests, and weighing the merits of alternative pathways to meeting global food demand with least impact on biodiversity.
• Heeding the forecasts of global-scale degradation in ecosystem services that will follow from the current magnitude and pace of biodiversity loss, putting at risk up to 5 billion people by 2050.
• Distinguishing objective, credible and evidence-based science from partisan politics, bigoted opinion, and pseudoscience.
• Sharing a sense of urgency, through political activism or peaceful agitation.

We can play a part in slowing biodiversity loss and giving back to nature, by:

• Holding governments accountable for a lack of political will, either to regulate for conservation or to invest the relatively small sums required for biodiversity protection, even though science now has the know-how to save species and habitats, and the evidence that conservation spending reduces biodiversity loss and improves ecosystem services.
• Exercising our democratic right to vote for political parties that commit to transformative change in sustainability pathways.
• Participating in decision-making processes, for example by:

• signing up to a Citizens’ Assembly, or to Youth for Nature and their UK movement;
• influencing company policy on recycling, investments, sustainable development;
• lobbying our MP on criteria for biodiversity offsetting, or airport expansion plans;
• consulting with Town or Borough Councillors on local river management, or commitments to recycling;
• deciding where to plant free trees donated by the Woodland Trust.

• Becoming a decision-maker, for example by working for local government, or for councils that advise government such as the JNCC.
• Campaigning for change collectively, or by joining advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth.
• Volunteering for conservation work with local organisations, such as the SUSU Conservation Volunteers, the Hampshire Conservation Volunteers, the Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust.
• Acquiring biodiverse land to hold in trust, through donations to charitable organisations such as the World Land Trust, Woodland Trust, National Trust.
• Entrusting financial wealth to an ethical bank, and putting capital savings into sustainable or ethical investments.
• Supporting conservation work by charitable NGOs such as the WWF, RSPB, Mammal Society.
• Joining citizen science projects, such as the University Mammal Challenge, the Cetalingua Project.
• Founding or joining a startup to develop new technologies for a circular economy.
• Talking about environmental impacts and encouraging colleagues, friends and family to join in with reducing the human footprint, leveraging the power of social media and the attraction of social gatherings, as promoted for example by the University of Southampton's Nature and Biodiversity Community Hub (BioHub).
• Giving children a say in their future.
• Planning for smaller family units, and using waste-free contraception.
• Cutting back on meat from land-monopolising livestock, in favour of more energy efficient plant-based foods, and encouraging others also to diversify their diets.
• Buying organic foods where available and affordable.
• Consuming locally grown seasonal foods, in preference to international imports that have no certified origin in sustainable agriculture, fishing or aquaculture.
• Purchasing commodities with sustainability certification, such as Fairtrade products, MSC certified seafood, RSPO certified palm oil, RTRS certified soya, FSC certified wood and paper.
• Checking for CITES export/import permits when buying into the international cut-flower trade, and additionally for internationally recognised health certificates when buying into the tropical aquarium trade or other exotic pet trades.
• Shopping and dining at zero-waste retail outlets, such as the University of Southampton Plant Pot.
• Composting kitchen and garden waste.
• Fostering endangered plants in the garden.
• Triaging household waste for the recycling bin or for taking to municipal recycling centres and recycling banks.
• Curtailing reliance on single-use plastics, for packaging, bottles, bags, cups, drinking straws.
• Treasuring old clothes, then donating or recycling worn out textiles.
• Reporting notifiable invasive species, such as Japanese knotweed.
• Curbing the environmental impact of pets, for example with a bell on a cat’s collar to reduce wildlife predation, and sourcing plant-based protein for cat and dog food.
• Indulging responsibly in tourism, for example by avoiding exploitative eco-attractions.
• Arranging to have ourselves composted after death, a more sustainable alternative to incineration or burial.
• Respecting the Countryside Code.
• Eschewing pessimism and cynicism, in favour of impatient optimism.
• Helping others to help others… better that we all do a bit than one person does everything.

We can help to minimise the impacts of global heating on ecosystems, by:

• Engaging with the climate and biodiversity science that foretells the future for all of today’s young people.
• Having one fewer child.
• Scaling down our own carbon footprint, with less flying and driving, in favour of trains and bicycles.
• Reducing elicited carbon emissions, by consuming less imported food and bottled water, in favour of local foods and potable tap water.
• Going peat-free in the garden.
• Eating a healthy diet and reducing food waste.
• Loving peas and other protein-rich vegetables, as UK land use shifts away from methane-producing cattle and sheep, towards a higher investment in arable crops, horticulture and biofuels, and subsidised afforestation for carbon capture.
• Switching the household energy supplier to one that prioritises carbon offsetting and renewable energy.
• Saving energy at home by installing insulation and switching off unused lights and appliances.
• Bringing cardigans back into fashion: wearing more layers of clothing instead of turning up the central heating.
  

Pages maintained by C. Patrick Doncaster

Last update 3 November 2023.