Hank Paulson: The World's Biodiversity Is in Peril
We’re Living Through One of the Most Explosive Extinction Episodes Ever
Twin crises afflict the natural world. The first is climate change. Its causes and potentially catastrophic consequences are well known. The second crisis has received much less attention and is less understood but still requires urgent attention by global policymakers. It is the collapse of biodiversity, the sum of all things living on the planet.
With climate change, we have a plausible, if imperfect, strategy to avoid the worst outcomes. The world needs to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by around 2050 by reducing emissions and taking carbon out of the atmosphere. But for the biodiversity crisis, there is no comparable framework. There are no technological fixes to restore species that go extinct. And no cost-effective, man-made replacement for natural systems.