Your very survival is dependent...
...on a highly complex network of other species on Earth
You can breathe because plants, animals and bacteria...
...regulate the atmosphere
You eat crops that depend on a climate and a water cycle...
...that is regulated by forests
Humans depend on healthy ecosystems
Yet it’s humans that have put all of this at risk
Pollution, climate change and the exploitation of habitats...
...and loss of biodiversity are playing havoc with ecosystems
Ecologists have been warning of a sixth mass extinction...
...and there’s academic debate over whether that’s already happening
What’s very clear is the rate of extinctions is alarming
Of the estimated 8m animal and plant species on Earth...
...1m are at risk of extinction
Three-quarters of land and two-thirds of marine environments...
...have been significantly altered by human actions
The populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles...
...and fish shrank by 68% on average between 1970 and 2016
In short, animals are becoming extinct at the fastest rate...
...in all of human history
It’s alarming because...
...human societies basically depend on there being...
...a diversity of organisms and ecosystems out there
So the biodiversity crisis presents a threat to human societies
Humanity relies on a narrow range of species for food and resources
But those species are themselves...
...part of a complex ecological web that can’t be sustained...
...without a much greater diversity of animals, plants and bacteria
Take tuna...
We fish tuna, we eat tuna, but the tuna doesn’t exist on its own...
...it’s at the top of a huge food chain
Microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton...
...are eaten by micronekton, like shrimp...
...which are eaten by smaller fish...
...which in turn are eaten by tuna...
...and that’s just one chain of a much wider ecosystem
You need all of the stuff that the tuna eats throughout its life...
...in order to get the tuna that you net at the end...
...and that you serve on a dish
The biodiversity crisis may pose as great a risk...
...to humans as climate change...
...but it gets far less attention
In many ways those two crises are interlinked
The largest sink for carbon emissions is...
...plants soaking CO2 out of the atmosphere, turning it into...
...plant material through photosynthesis
As we lose plants, we contribute to the climate problem
You can’t solve the climate problem...
...unless you solve the biodiversity crisis
But there is a glimmer of hope
An explosion of new technology in the past ten years...
...from motion-activated camera traps...
...to microphone monitors and radio tags...
...which is helping ecologists to track, measure and protect life on Earth
The Global Airborne Observatory is a lab in the sky
It flies over coral reefs, savannahs and rainforests...
...gathering data about these vital ecosystems
It’s the brainchild of Dr Greg Asner, a renowned ecologist
Our airborne programme and our satellite programme...
...have been deployed to understand...
...how our rainforests are changing, how temperate forests are...
...changing, African savannahs and even tropical coral reefs
Our technology allows us to put together a picture...
...of the biodiversity of a region...
...how much carbon is stored in that region...
...and the health of the ecosystem overall
It looks like some relatively younger corals down in here
The data collected can then be used to create 3D models...
...of entire landscapes
Our technologies have advanced over the last 20-plus years...
...to include lasers that fire out of the bottom of the aeroplane...
...and those laser beams image the land surface
That gives us a 3D view of what we have...
...and we fuse that with another technology...
...called an imaging spectrometer
That technology tells us the chemical composition...
...of the environment
We’re going to come up on another dark patch here
Initially the team’s work concentrated just on forests
But the radical changes in coral reefs due to climate change...
...and coastal development...
...prompted them to diversify their research
I’m really interested in this one because it’s such a large colony
Work has really been focused on understanding...
...what is happening to our reefs?
It’s a much harder problem because literally it’s covered by seawater
The story out there is that all coral reefs are dying
They’re all in trouble, but they’re not all dying
There’s a wide range of outcomes right now from good, to bad...
...to pretty ugly conditions
Our technology is letting us work with governments...
...work with conservation, work with managers...
...to understand in more detail what they’ve got
It’s really the kind of detailed information that...
...puts biodiversity into the discussion, into and onto the table...
...among decision-makers
From up in the air to down on the ground...
...there’s a huge and highly sophisticated patchwork of technology...
...that is monitoring biodiversity all around the world
And as the tech gets smarter, smaller and cheaper...
...it presents even greater opportunities
One of the first rules of making a sensor to put in the field...
...is it has to be small and cryptic and easy to hide
This tiny device is helping to protect endangered species
I’m holding in my hand one of our Trail Guard AI cameras...
...and you can see right away how small it is...
...it’s basically a little bit longer than my index finger
It’s been designed by Eric Dinerstein...
...a leading expert in biodiversity technology
But unlike most conservation cameras...
...TrailGuard doesn’t track wildlife...
...but poachers
Essentially Trail Guard is an AI-infused, camera-based alert system...
...that functions like a burglar alarm for national parks
It allows 150 rangers...
...to be as effective as 1,500 hundred rangers
Poaching is responsible for the destruction...
...of a number of animal populations in Africa
It’s still the largest direct threat...
...to many of the world’s most engandered species
In the first trial of TrailGuard in Africa...
...we were able to detect 30 poachers...
...representing 20 different poaching gangs
The protection forces on the ground were able to make...
...significant number of arrests
TrailGuard’s strength is down to machine-learning technology
The AI scans through the camera’s images for poachers...
...and issues an alert if one is detected
Here’s a picture of me...
...you can see the bounding box around it determines...
...that I am indeed a human being
If it was a picture of my dog, it would say that’s not a human...
...I’m going to filter out that image and not send it
For conservationists, AI has revolutionised the time-consuming task...
...of scanning through images, sound recordings...
...and other data samples
One of the most pressing conservation problems we have...
...in the world today is: how do we monitor endangered species?
They’re very hard for biologists to study
We can now use computer vision to monitor the movements...
...and behaviour of these endangered species, like tigers and rhinos...
...and elephants
But even if every living creature on the planet could be logged...
...the data would be useless without understanding...
...how every species relates to everything else
One solution could be to develop better biodiversity models
Much like climate models, they would forecast the impact...
...of changes to ecosystems
But addressing the loss of diversity...
...will require funding and the support of governments
All the sensors in the world...
...are not going to save a species from going extinct
You’re going to need policies and you’re going to need...
...humans on the ground to effect those policies
Yet policymakers’ response to the biodiversity crisis has been slow
In 2010 a list of 20 conservation targets...
...known as the Aichi targets was drawn up
The Aichi targets are incredibly complex...
...incredibly detailed, in what they’re trying to achieve...
...but also horrifically vague in how they are to be met...
...and what a measurement of success is for most of them
The result of all of this is that by the time the...
...reckoning day came in 2020, none of the targets were fully met
Right now humanity is on a trajectory that’s heading off a cliff
All of the technology in the world cannot compensate...
...if we don’t have the political will to use that information...
...and protect life on Earth
I’m Catherine Brahic, environment editor for The Economist...
...to read our report on conservation technology, please click the link
And thank you for watching