One Million Species Will Disappear — If We Let Them

When the findings of a landmark UN report on biodiversity came out last week, the headlines ran the gamut from depressing to apocalyptic. One million species face extinction, readers were told. Almost a third of the world’s reef-forming coral species, more than a third of its marine mammals, and 40 percent of its amphibian species could die out. And that’s just the number of species. Some 70 percent of all coral reefs could be affected by mass bleaching induced by climate change — in a scenario that isn’t even the worst case.

These grim findings were all important and worthy of attention, of course. But amid the gloom, a major point of the report went largely unnoticed: It doesn’t have to be this way.