BIODIVERSITY IS CRASHING – EVEN IN ‘PRISTINE’ ENVIRONMENTS 🐛🌍
“It’s the same sheet, with the same lights, in the same place, looking over the same vegetation. Same time of year, same time of the moon cycle – everything about it is identical. There’s just no moths on that sheet,” says entomologist Daniel Janzen, who has been monitoring insects in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste conservation area since the 1970s.
His story, covered by The Guardian some weeks ago, is not an isolated one. Around the world, ecologists are witnessing what some now call a new phase of ecological collapse.
👉 Here are five takeaways we cannot afford to ignore:
- Once-insect-rich, loud forests are now falling silent.
Where light traps once drew thousands of moths, now there may be only one. In the past, even if pesticides wiped out insects over an agricultural region, as long as healthy populations remained elsewhere, species could return if the spraying stopped. This is no longer the case, today, that buffer is disappearing.
- Protected areas are no longer safe havens ☣️
Insects are disappearing even in conservation areas untouched by pesticides or human settlement. This is a new and alarming phase in the ecological crisis.
- The food web is collapsing from the bottom up.
In the Luquillo rainforest, scientists in 2018 mapped how the loss of insects set other dominoes falling: as insect populations crash, so do the species that rely on them. These effects threaten the entire forest food web.
- Insect ecosystems – the foundation of countless ecosystems – are especially sensitive.
Insects pollinate plants, break down waste, enrich the soil, and feed birds, mammals, reptiles, and much more… They have evolved to synchronise their hibernations and breeding periods with small environmental cues: a shift in humidity, a few more minutes of daylight, a tiny temperature change.
With the climate spinning out of rhythm, these interconnected systems are faltering.
- The damage is no longer local – it’s everywhere.
Heat-driven declines could have repercussions far beyond their immediate surroundings. Unlike past damage from pesticides that was localised, climate impacts are global – meaning even remote reserves can’t offer refuge.
Relentless climate shocks, habitat destruction, light pollution, chemical exposure, and industrial agriculture are hitting all at once, leaving no room for recovery.
BUT THERE IS HOPE ❇️ – if we start restoring our ecosystems at scale now, we can recover the biodiversity we’ve lost and create a more regenerative world.
We work with people and organisations globally who are dedicated to restoring their local landscape for the benefit of people, nature and businesses alike.
We’ve seen firsthand how quickly wildlife can recover if you work in collaboration with nature through a bottom-up, place-based approach.
🌱 Share your thoughts: How do we begin to repair a system when its most invisible parts are vanishing? ⬇️
