Problem

CLICK HERE - WWF - Living Planet Report 2018: Aiming Higher

"There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people" without biodiversity, the report warns.

nbcnews.com - by Rachel Elbaum - October 30, 2018

The population of the planet's vertebrates has dropped an average of 60 percent since 1970, according to a report by the WWF conservation organization.

The most striking decline in vertebrate population was in the tropics in South and Central America, with an 89 percent loss compared to 1970. Freshwater species have also significantly fallen — down 83 percent in that period.

The Living Planet Index, provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and included in the WWF Living Planet 2018 report, tracked the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians around the world between 1970 and 2014, the latest year for which data was available.

Living Planet Index shows vertebrate populations are set to decline by 67% on 1970 levels unless urgent action is taken to reduce humanity’s impact

A victim of poachers in Kenya: elephants are among the species most impacted by humans, the WWF report found. Photograph: imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock

CLICK HERE - Living Planet Report 2016

theguardian.com - by Damian Carrington - October 26, 2016

The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame.

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Image: Flares at the Bridgeton Landfill outside St. Louis burn off noxious fumes, including those generated by an underground fire that's been burning since 2010. The "fire" is really a high-temperature chemical reaction that consumes the waste below the landfill's surface. Véronique LaCapra/St. Louis Public Radio

npr.org - November 3rd, 2015 - Veronique Lacapra

Imagine you are a parent, and that out of the blue, you get a letter from your child's school telling you not to worry — that they're ready to evacuate or shelter in place if an underground fire at a nearby landfill reaches radioactive waste on the same property.

That's pretty much what happened recently in suburban St. Louis.

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/