The EU Environment Council reached an agreement on aims and ambitions for managing biodiversity loss across Europe on 15 March this year when it adopted the following conclusions:
“[The Council] AGREES on a long-term vision that by 2050 European Union biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides – its natural capital – are protected, valued and appropriately restored for biodiversity’s intrinsic value and for their essential contribution to human wellbeing and economic prosperity, and so that catastrophic changes caused by the loss of biodiversity are avoided;”
“For this vision to be achieved [the Council] AGREES further on a headline target of halting the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020, and restoring them in so far as feasible, while stepping up the EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss;”
These resolutions appeared on page three (paragraphs one and two) of the following document; “Council conclusions on biodiversity post-2010 – EU and global vision and targets and international access and burden sharing regime“.
These conclusions were later supported by the EU Council of Ministers, in the published conclusions of a meeting held on 25/26 March:
“There is an urgent need to reverse continuing trends of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. The European Council is committed to the long term biodiversity 2050 vision and the 2020 target set out in the Council’s conclusions of 15 March 2010.” (Page nine, paragraph 14).
The declaration of the EU target will no doubt inform discussions upon a formal successor to the target to slow biodiversity loss (to halt this decline in Europe), at the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting this October in Nagoya, Japan.
Perhaps I am mistaken but it appears the human community is currently saddled with a widely shared, consensually validated and pernicious misperception: that food production must be endlessly increased to feed a growing population. Where are the experts who are reporting that this misconception could be a product of preternatural thought and pseudo-scientific investigation borne mainly of political convenience and economic expedience? Have these experts not noticed that peer-reviewed articles are extant that directly contradict these prevailing mistaken impressions regarding human population dynamics. This is a tragedy in the making. How are people to respond ably to the human-driven threats before humanity if the best available science regarding human population dynamics is rejected?
From my humble inexpert perspective, the best available science of human population dynamics has been and continues to be willfully ignored by most experts. I would like to make an appeal to the BES community now. It is not anything new. The entire point of the AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population during the past decade of denial has been to encourage open discussion of the best research on the population dynamics of the human species, population dynamics that have led us to be overpopulating the Earth in a dangerous way. Please, someone with expertise or a group of experts, please comment on the research by David Pimentel and Russell Hopfenberg which indicates with remarkable simplicity and clarity that human population numbers could be a function of food supply; that food supply is the independent variable and absolute population numbers of the human species is the dependent variable; that the population dynamics of the human species is essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species.