Biodiversity touches every aspect of our lives –so why has its loss been ignored?

From our environment to our economies, our security to our societies, biodiversity is vital. But preserving it will require transformative change

The evidence is unequivocal: biodiversity, important in its own right and essential for current and future generations, is being destroyed by human activities at a rate unprecedented in human history.

Governments around the world recognised this at the Earth summit in Brazil in 1992 and established the Convention on Biological Diversity to protect and conserve biodiversity. But the situation has become more and more dire. I have chaired or co-chaired three international assessments on the state of knowledge of biodiversity, and all have repeated the same message - we are destroying it at an alarming rate. Each time we have called for action, only to be largely ignored.