Stopping a mass extinction

With good reason, the United Nations has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, but global attention has been inadequate.

A widely used technical definition of biodiversity is: "The variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems, and the ecological complexes of which they are a part of: This includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems." Simply put, it's the incredible number and diversity of life forms on earth, and their complex, mostly unknowable linkages.

Estimates of the number of species currently on the planet vary from five million to 100 million, with a loose consensus around the 10-20 million levels. This is the simplest measure of biodiversity.

What does biodiversity do for us? There are some simple, direct benefits that all of us can see everyday. A number of "economic goods" come from it: medicines, fibers, rubber, wood, paper, oil and so on. But this is just the most mundane and superficial impact of biodiversity. Some of the deeper, complex phenomena, on which humanity depends, are our entire food chain, practically all our "ecosystem services" (for example, the chemistry of the atmosphere, purification of water in nature and its supply, soil nutrient cycles) and climate change, which both affects and is affected by biodiversity.

We, Homo sapiens, are an inextricable part of this complex web of life. It's both presumptuous and silly to ask what biodiversity does for us - a little like asking what the rest of the body and organs do for the bones, or what the rest of the organization does for the accountants.

We don't, and never will, actually understand all the intricacies of this complex web. Rigorous scientific research has given us many insights, among the most powerful being that the more biodiverse a system, the more stable it is.

We are losing this biodiversity at a rate that is about a thousand times faster than the "background rate" of the extinction of species. The "background rate" is the natural rate of extinction derived from fossil records of the past 540 million (sic) years. The potentially tragic destinies of the panda, the tiger and the rhino are always in the spotlight. We should be conscious of the fact that this is less than the tip of the iceberg.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has developed a widely used classification of the causes of biodiversity loss. This is exhaustive and immeasurably useful, but it's not possible to repeat it here. For our purpose, E.O. Wilson's evocative capturing of the essence of the causes in the acronym HIPPO is sufficient. HIPPO stands for Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Human overpopulation, and Overharvesting of wild species. All of this is caused by humans. To this list we can add human-induced climate change.

Some estimates project that 30% of all species currently on the planet will be extinct by 2050. These estimates also suggest that if the rates of biodiversity loss continue to be what they are, most species will become extinct in a few hundred years.

Five times in the past 540 million years, the earth has gone through "mass extinction" - the wiping out of millions of species in a short period of time. In each of these episodes, more than 50% of all erstwhile species became extinct. Fossil records are fairly clear about these extinctions. The last and most famous of these, the Cretaceous Tertiary Extinction, which happened around 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs.

We are actually living through the sixth such mass extinction, and the current rate of species loss is as much or more than that during any of the previous five episodes. Scientists call this phase the "Holocene Extinction".

Is the situation as desperate and dramatic as I am making it out to be? The scientific evidence is fairly clear - it's up to each of us to draw our own conclusions. It would be useful to remember that this is a drama that has in the past always happened over "geological time scales". This time, it seems to be unfolding in a flash - over human generational time scales.

There are some hypotheses, but we are not sure as to what caused the last five extinctions, nor can we be sure what the earth and life on it was like after each such episode. This, the sixth time, we are sure about the cause – us. However, we can only be as unsure about what earth and life will be like afterwards.

There is another reason why I would like to be unsure about the outcome. This time around, the "cause" – humanity, us - can be conscious of its effect. And if we become conscious enough, we will hopefully do things to reverse the trend, making this not the sixth mass extinction, but an extinction blip in the long history and future of this planet. We need to place all our bets on that.

About the Author

Anurag Behar is the Chief Sustainability Officer of Wipro Limited, CEO for Azim Premji Foundation & Vice Chancellor, Azim Premji University. The Foundation and the University established by it are not-for-profit organizations committed to the vision of "contributing towards a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society". They run institutions and programs in India for improving school education and in related fields of human development. The field work of the Foundation is in collaboration with various state governments, to help improve equity and quality of the public education system. The current geographical focus of this work is in 7 states of India, which have over 350,000 schools. The University's teaching and research programs are also focused on the fields of Education and Development.

Anurag has been closely involved with efforts to improve education in India for the past eleven years. He has been a vocal advocate for the critical importance of public systems, in particular the public education system. His years in business have given him an insider's view in to both the possibilities and limits of markets. For the past few years he has also been engaged with environmental and ecological issues. He writes a fortnightly column for the newspaper Mint, on Education and Ecology, available on www.livemint.com.

He has led the social and ecological initiatives of Wipro Ltd for the past eleven years. He continues to provide oversight to this work as the Chief Sustainability Officer of Wipro.

Anurag has earlier played leadership roles in business. As the CEO of Wipro Infrastructure Engineering, he led the business from being No. 20 in the world to being the No. 1 in 5 years. The business has operations in Europe, India, Brazil and China. He led Wipro's investments in two strategic diversifications - in the Clean Energy and Water sectors. Earlier he has been responsible for multiple functions of Wipro including Brand, Quality and Innovation. He has also worked with GE Medical Systems, including being part of the team that built the leadership position of Wipro GE Healthcare in South Asia.

Anurag has served on the Board of Wipro GE Healthcare Ltd and of the TERI University. He serves on various government & industry councils, such as the National Mission on Teachers and Teacher Education, the Government of India implementation committee for the Justice Verma Commission, and with the CII's National Climate Change Council. He has been honored by the World Economic Forum, by being recognized as a 'Young Global Leader'.

He has an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur and a BE in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Trichy. He enjoys long distance running.

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