Ecological disaster rings: Why ecosystems collapse can happen more often than expected

An anonymous Slashdot reader wrote: An Essay on natural sustainability It suggests that models may have underestimated the effects of warming on ecosystems. The two main reasons for this variability are the difficulty of accounting and climate change in combination with other pressure factors, such as pollution, overexploitation of species, deforestation due to population growth and meat consumption, ecological fragmentation, harming wild animals.

After using the software to simulate more than 70,000 ecological scenarios, the two professors and a postdoctoral researcher He gave this warning The conversation:

Around the world, rainforests are becoming savannah or farmland, savannahs are drying out and turning into deserts, and frozen tundras are melting. Indeed, scientific studies now document such “regime shifts.” More than 20 different types of ecosystems Points of suggestion are passed. More than 20% of ecosystems worldwide are at risk of conversion or collapse.

These failures can happen faster than you think. Humans are already putting pressure on ecosystems. Many different ways – What we call stress. And when you combine these stresses with climate-specific weather increases, the day when these important points are crossed can reach up to 80%. This means that the ecological collapse that we previously expected to avoid by the end of this century could occur within the next few decades. That’s the bleak conclusion of our latest research, published in Natural sustainability.

Population growth, economic demands, and greenhouse gas concentrations have put pressure on ecosystems and landscapes to provide food and maintain key services such as clean water. The number of extreme weather events is increasing and It gets worse. Worryingly, climate extremes can hit already stressed ecosystems, which in turn transmit new or heightened stresses to other ecosystems, and so on. This means that a collapsing ecosystem can affect neighboring ecosystems. A series of observations: An “ecological doom-loop” situation, with dire consequences…

There is no way to restore damaged ecosystems in any reasonable timeframe. There are no ecological guarantees. In financial parlance, we just have to take the hit.