Wild species of plants and animals, relied on by the world’s poorest for food, must be used more sustainably in order to achieve global development goals, say the authors of a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Billions of people in developed and developing nations alike depend on wild flora and fauna for their daily food and energy needs, and often their livelihoods, the policymakers’ summary of the Assessment Report on the Sustainable Use of Wild Species highlights.
But the accelerating global biodiversity crisis, which sees a million species of plants and animals facing extinction, threatens these contributions to people, it says.
Marla Emery, one of the report’s coordinators and a scientific advisor with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, said 70 per cent of the world’s poor were directly dependent on wild species.
“One in five people rely on wild plants, algae, and fungi for their food and income; 2.4 billion rely on fuel wood for cooking and about 90 per cent of the 120 million people working in capture fisheries are supported by small-scale fishing,” she said.
Emery said the analysis showed how responsible use of these resources had a “very significant contribution” to make in realising the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Jean-Marc Fromentin, a researcher at the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea, said: “Recent global estimates confirm that about 34 per cent of marine wild fish stocks are overfished and 66 per cent are fished within biologically sustainable levels. But within this global picture there are significant local and contextual variations.
“Countries with robust fisheries management have seen stocks increasing in abundance. The Atlantic bluefin tuna population, for instance, has been rebuilt and is now fished within sustainable levels.”
For countries and regions with low-intensity fisheries management, Fromentin says the status of stocks is often poorly known, but generally believed to be below the abundance that would optimise sustainable food production.
“Many small-scale fisheries are unsustainable or only partially sustainable, especially in Africa for both inland and marine fisheries, and in Asia, Latin America, and Europe for coastal fisheries,” he said.