You may or may not have heard of a report that's been out by WWF and the London Zoological Society. It's called the 2024 Living Planet Report, a system in peril. You've probably heard about it. Biodiversity is down to 73% over the last 50 years, obviously not good. But you're probably also wondering, it's like, why should I care about biodiversity? What does it really bring to me? We're going to talk about the report, why it's important to you, why you should care about biodiversity, and what we need to do better as scientists and conservationists to make sure that you do care, and you know why you should care about biodiversity. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is a podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And if this is your first time here or your second or your third or your 25th or your 1600s, it doesn't matter. Here is where you find out all about the ocean. I'm a resource for you, I have a podcast, I have a website, I have all this different types of social media, we have videos on YouTube, and you can get all that at www.speakupforblue.com. You can also sign up to our newsletter at speakupforblue.com/newsletter and get information about the ocean to your inbox Monday to Friday. You get at least three news articles, you'll get at least three job advertisements if you had decided to have a career in marine biology, and you'll get updates on the podcast videos or whatever we released to help you understand the ocean and help you live for a better ocean. Today we're talking about biodiversity, and you're probably wondering, Andrew, why the heck do I have to worry about biodiversity? Why do I care? Well, there's a report out that says, hey, you know what, a lot of people don't care because over the last 50 years from 1970 to 2020, there has been at least a drop in 73% of species. Just to go into some of the details further, we've seen the decline in Latin America by 95% and Africa by 76%. Latin America, I believe, includes the Caribbean. The report highlights the tipping points for ecosystems like the Amazon and coral reefs that are fast approaching, and to reverse trends, the report calls for trends more informative actions in food, energy, and financial systems, and enhanced conservation efforts while supporting indigenous and local community roles. That's fine and dandy. That all sounds great, but why the heck aren't we doing it? This is the problem that we've seen a number of times, and to be honest, I've discussed it with a lot of other biologists, a lot of other conservationists, ocean, land, freshwater, you know, it's all up for grabs. Like we've seen a lot of the problems in tons of places, right? And it's all over the world, you know, this one reports, you know, Latin America and Africa seem to be the top, but it's everywhere, and we've seen decreases in freshwater species by 85%, terrestrial species by 69%, and marine species by 56%. That's a lot. Those are a lot of species where we probably don't know a lot about, but they're actually going extinct, or they're getting a drop in those. And we talk about it on this podcast, right? We talk about the Northern right whale. We talk about manatees. We talk about a lot of these different species that are either going extinct or are in trouble and danger of going extinct, right? They're on the Endangered Species Act or the Species at Risk Act, depending on what country you're in, right? We've seen the decline. We've seen how we treat our oceans. We've seen how we develop along the coastline in various places, whether it be in North America, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in Africa, whether it be in Latin America, whether it be in the Caribbean. And we destroy all these beautiful places, natural places, to put in what we think are tourist areas, right? We see these resorts that are just gorgeous resorts, but they've been put in place of a natural area that have mangroves and sea grasses and all that kind of stuff. And we just ignore it. We just don't care about biodiversity. As a species, we don't talk about biodiversity. We talk about coral reefs. We talk about the Amazon forests. And we know that there's a lot of diversity of species that are being affected by those areas. And these are iconic areas. These are areas where we need to focus on, and we need to say, "Hey, if we don't protect these habitats, these wonderful ecosystems, we are going to -- we're going to be in for it." And we are starting to be in for it, because we're starting to see the decline of these species, these habitats, these ecosystems, whatever that might be. And that's a problem. That's a huge problem for us as human species. But again, we don't care about these systems. We don't care about biodiversity, because there's no connection. We say biodiversity when we say, "Hey, you have to protect everything." You know, first I want to talk about biodiversity. We're going to find out what that is, because biodiversity is something that is so important to every single realm, whether it be freshwater, whether it be land, whether it be the marine realm, it's important to keep everything stabilized. So biodiversity is basically protecting all things so that we maintain stability in our systems. When you take out something from a healthy, biodiverse system, if an animal goes extinct from that system, right, so say you're in a coral reef, and you have a particular species of parrotfish that goes extinct or is extirpated from that system, right, doesn't mean it's extinct from the world, it's just extirpated, just gone from that area, from that one particular area. You all have other parrotfish that are around that area, so that it could still have the same function as those parrotfish, right, the ones that are just left, because you have different species of parrotfish, because you will have this healthy, biodiverse area. So you have these functional species that help habitats, parrotfish will eat and eat algae off of coral. Sometimes they take a little bit of the coral with them, but it allows that coral to regenerate and it allows the algae to get off that coral. So it maintains a healthy coral. Without parrotfish or other fish that eat algae off of corals, the corals wouldn't get pruned of algae, and if you have a system where climate change is affecting it, the waters are getting hotter, the sun is on it longer, you start to get algae, right? You start to get nutrients that are going into the system, algae growth starts to proliferate, and then they outgrow the corals because they grow so fast, the corals need sunlight, they get suffocated without that sunlight, and then the coral, the reef just grows over it. Or the algae just grows over the reef, the reef starts to dissipate, and if you don't have those algae eaters, not all the time, but you don't have those algae eaters and you have other effects, a cumulative that are on this, like bad water quality and climate change and heating of the water, then you start to get this system that proliferates into a mess of algae, and you lose that biodiversity because you lose the coral reefs because it just spreads all across, and all these fish are gone because they don't want to be around an area where they can't hide, they can't feed off of the corals, they can't feed on other animals that are helping the corals, like it's just, it becomes a nightmare, right? And that's what happens a lot of times in the ocean. The reefs die either from overheating or bleaching, or they die from nutrient overgrowth, or algae overgrowth because of excess nutrients in the water and hotter water, and we start to see all this, this, this area that's so biodiverse, it just gets dissipated, right? It just gets destroyed, and then you have other systems such as seagrass and mangrove forests that probably have more biodiversity than coral reefs, but they are not as appealing, they're not as nice. When people see seagrass in the water, and they're along like a shoreline, say, of a resort or a hotel, they're like, oh, that's gross, there's seaweed in there, but this seagrass plays a really important role in making sure that the species can hide, and they can grow as a nursery habitat, you know, so that they can go out to the coral reef, or they can go out into other systems, and they can do their function, but without that habitat to help them hide and help them feed on other animals, they'll make them grow bigger and get stronger, without that habitat there, those animals are gone, they're not, they're not going to be found there, and there's nothing going to be in those areas. So by taking out seagrass habitats, you take out, you know, the biodiversity, same thing with mangroves, mangroves are home to a lot of small fish and a lot of small invertebrates that use that area as a nursing area, right, a nursery area, and they just kind of proliferate in there, they get bigger, they go to different areas, and that's just the system of life, that's just in the ocean, we're not talking about, you know, freshwater, we're not talking about land because that's not what we cover in this podcast, but that's happening all over the place. We see the destruction of habitats for one reason or another, whether it's indirectly or directly caused by human beings, and then we see a change in the system because the diversity goes down, because there's been so many impacts, and then that system changes to the point where it's just a tipping point, and it just can't be reversed. But if you have a biodiverse area, where you have a lot of different species that do the same function, but one of those species gets extirpated for whatever reason that might be, that's just natural, you know, evolution. Those other functional species will be able to keep that habitat up, right, but as I explained this to you, I'm probably losing some of you, where you're just like, oh, yeah, like nobody's going to believe this. My mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, my, they're just my niece nephew, they may not care about biodiversity because they don't see that impact. And to be honest, I've been racking my brain, I'll be like, how do we get people to care about biodiversity? How does that work? I don't get it. Because when we talk about biodiversity, we're not talking about one specific species. But if I talk about a manatee, and I say, we need to protect the manatees, that's all great. When I was in school, we used to talk about the umbrella species, like whales, right, marine mammals, dolphins, you know, sometimes even sharks as a fish, a cartonade, just fish, a lot of them all ranks, where we talk about these fish species and marine mammal species as this sort of icon, right? People love it. Same as sea turtles. People love it. And they want to protect that one individual species, right, northern right whale, humpback whale, you know, common dolphins, spinner dolphins, orcas, might be like a great white shark, might be sea lions, you just never know. People connect with a lot of different animals. And those animals become an important conservation sort of iconic piece. And we call it the umbrella species, because if you protect like a great white shark, for instance, like they did in California, if you protect great white sharks that were endangered at one point, you have to protect what they eat. They eat sea lions on the California coast, so you have to protect sea lions. So you see this endangered great white shark that people, you know, love to hate at some point or we're scared enough because of the movie Jaws, but that started to go, they realized that those species started to go down. People were killing them and they needed to, that population needs to stabilize and grow. So how do we do that? Well, people will realize that they were killing the sea lions off, right? The sea lions are being killed off, also the sea lions' food, the sardines and so forth, with smaller fish, were getting eaten as well, or not only eaten, but overfished. So what did they do? They came out with pieces of legislation, three pieces of a legislation that would protect all three levels in that food web. So they protected the fish with the Magnuson Stevens' Act in the US in the 1970s. Then they protected the sea lions with the Marine Male Protection Act in the 1970s and then they protected the great white shark as an endangered species, as part of the Endangered Species Act. And I don't know when that was installed. I'm going to say the 1970s, but I don't know if that's true. But regardless, all those pieces were saved, part of that food web, right? What happens? The fish start to come back. The sea lion population started to grow and the great white shark population grew. And now it's grown so much that we've found that it's a nursery habitat in Southern California for great white sharks, and that they're starting to spread around more all the way up north into San Francisco area, right, Oakland area, and in the Bay area, the Monterey Bay, and then even further north to Oregon. So now, like off the coast of Oregon, so we're starting to see this growth of a species in the 1970s that was actually found to be endangered, and we protected other species. We're protected the biodiversity of that system so that we can see one species, this one iconic species, the umbrella species grow. And that's wonderful, but the problem is, is that sometimes when you protect one species, you affect another, or you don't affect a lot of the other species, right? So by protecting the sea lions population and protecting the sardine population, well, now other populations were ignored, maybe that didn't really help. So then we started to move towards a habitat approach. Let's protect the habitats, not just the individual species, that still needs to be protected. That's one tool in the conservation toolbox, but then we need to protect the habitat, right, or a number of different habitats. So we started to say, all right, let's protect coral reefs, but we can't just protect coral reefs because coral reefs are affected by the number and the system that has a piece of sea grass, right, a patch of sea grass, or even mangroves, or both. So now we know that these habitats are connected, so we started to say, let's look at the ecosystem level, a number of different habitats that have a different set of species, or the same as species at different life cycles that can maintain an entire ecosystem, that collective of habitats and communities, right? So that's a good piece. That's when we started to bring in protected areas and marine protected areas. And so we started to protect that, that not only protects from fisheries, right, making sure that fisheries isn't overfished, but it also protects biodiversity, right? We protect the stability of the system. And then we realized when you protect biodiversity and protect that stability of the system, a lot of those habitats, sea grass habitats, mangrove habitats, coral reef habitats, have a security level that help the coastline maintain that energy dissipation of big waves that come in. So in 2004, a large tsunami in the Indian Ocean affected Africa, South Asia, and a lot of Southeast Asia islands. It killed a lot of people who was very devastating, it was around Christmas time. And when they started to do studies after to see how different areas were impacted or not impacted as much, they found that the areas that weren't as impacted by the energy of the wave, the wave coming in, the big tsunami coming in, they realized that they had a lot of their natural systems, mangrove, sea grasses, coral reefs intact. So areas that had those systems, either a combination of all three, or a combination of two, or even one, had less damage and less deaths to their villages and to the areas that were affected by the tsunami that knows that had them removed for either aquaculture or they're just removed because they weren't taken care of or there was development or anything like that. That really started to light the light bulb, let's just say, and say, "Hey, you know what? We need to protect these areas. They're not only good for biodiversity, they're not only good for fishing and feeding people, because a lot of people depend on the ocean for diverse fish and artisanal fishing and making sure local people can eat the fish and sell the fish so they can support their families." That happens more often than we think. I think me living in North America, I talked to a lot of people who were like, "We should stop fishing." But more often than not, most of the people in the world depend on some sort of seafood to sustain their protein that they need for their lives in general. So we need biodiversity to help with that and help support fisheries, local fisheries, as well as the protection, that's security. But again, how do we get people to really care about biodiversity? You don't see it on the news. You don't hear it on the podcast. You don't hear it on social media other than people like a friend of mine, Chris Cabera, who I just saw at TikTok where she was talking about biodiversity. And I even mentioned, I put a comment on that, I'm like, "How do we get people interested on biodiversity?" Because every time I talk about somebody, I can see the eyes glaze over. I can't see your eyes glazing over, but maybe it is, maybe it's not. I don't know. It's really difficult. So I asked some people around and I even asked around. So I really got to think about how do we get people interested. And I wrote down some notes that I'm going to talk about now. The first thing is get that personal connection into play. Demonstrate how biodiversity plays a role and affects the daily life of local communities. You might be in a local community around the ocean. You might be along a coastline. You might be along a wildlife area or a naturalized area. You might be around a lake. And when you start to personalize that, you start to say, "Hey, that lake that you love so much being on?" To stay that way, to make sure that you look on the coastline and you see, "Hey, I like the look of this. I like having my house near it. I like walking by it. I like going to the beach. I like having a cottage by it. I like looking out to lakes. I like looking out on rivers. I like the natural areas, the oceans. Make it personal. Make it the reason why you love it so much." And that's not the only time that's used. I remember working with the environment in Canada. I was doing this a conment when I was at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. I was working for Environment Canada. I was part of just a small part of working on the bi-national Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The reason why this group was coming in is some of the people in the upper management were like, "How do we get people to care about the Great Lakes? How do we get people to care about the health? What do they actually care about?" And a lot of it was people wanted to just stand along the coastline and look out onto a lake and be like, "I love this area. I want to see it healthy." So they don't want to see green. They don't want to smell something bad. They don't want to see like, "Oh, that's crazy polluted." There's a lot of people that I know that will not step in Lake Ontario in certain spots because it's so gross. And then that reputation goes around and people start to think about it in other spots that it's actually clean and they refuse to go in it. And they start to talk about that and it gets that reputation of it being a dirty lake. But it's not a dirty lake. I mean, there are certain spots that are not great, but there are other spots that you can enjoy Lake Ontario, you can enjoy Lake Erie, you can enjoy Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, you know, a Georgian Bay. All these areas are beautiful, but it gets this reputation and it takes away that connection because people don't want to go close to the shores as they usually do, right, or as they would like to because they hear this reputation. So having that personal connection and demonstrating how that personal connection will play a role and how biodiversity plays a role in protecting that personal connection, I think is really great. Education and awareness is the second thing. So sharing stories and facts through engaging media and community outreach. So this is where you get into the, like, on the ground kind of education. You talk to students, you talk to kids, you talk to adults, you get them in and around the ocean, you get them in and around the lake as community projects, not just cleaning up, but also enjoying the ocean. You know, Carissa put up a really cool post where it's just like sometimes you just got to enjoy nature. And as conservationists, a lot of the times we see such, we talk about such all the bad things about the ocean or all the bad things about nature, like happening to nature. Sometimes we forget that it's actually quite nice out there in certain spots and we should enjoy it. Even though we talk about nature all the time, it's good to take a break every once in a while, get re-inspired by connecting to nature, but also enjoying its beauty and what it brings to us and the value it brings to us. It actually helps us with our mental health, right? I think that's really important. So having that education where it's bringing people to the coastline that are not normally exposed to the coastline is a really big deal and a lot of people are stressing on programs or a lot of areas that are impoverished and they can't get to the coastline or they don't get to go to the coastline often, there are programs that will bring people to the coastline so that they can see the value and the beauty and maybe try to go out there a little bit more often without these programs if they can. And so that's just not for impoverished or successful areas. These are everybody needs to go out and connect to your coastline and then involvement and empowerment. So encourage actions like conservation projects and sustainable choices. So going and joining a network of conservation is like surf rider. If there's one in your area or you want to start one up, you can talk to surf rider. I'm sure they would be happy to see a network of volunteers start up. But encourage that, you know, going out and standing up for your local area, your local area of land, fresh water, marine, it doesn't matter, right? Whether you love the ocean in your 50 miles away or 100 or 500 miles inland, it doesn't matter. If you love the ocean, protect everything that's around it because if you protect the interior, the exterior won't be as affected by a bad interior, right? All the oceans are connected by water at some point in time. And so by protecting all that water, by protecting the land around that water, you're inevitably indirectly protecting the ocean. And I think that is really important. So when you look at involvement and empowerment, like get involved, get out there and start doing something with, you know, with the ocean, with the lakes, with a natural area, a park or something like that, get out there and enjoy it, get out there, serve on conservation projects and volunteer with organizations where you can, if you have the time, if you're able to do it, do with your family, it's really great activity. And it's good for the planet, it has a lot of impact and it makes you feel really, really great. And then of course, the last one is economic incentives to showcase the financial benefits of preserving nature. So just think about all the wonderful things you love to do in and around the coastline or in and around nature. People make money off of that. People make money off of ecotourism. People make money off of tourism. You know, you're not going to get these big resorts going to island nations if people don't go, if people don't enjoy those areas, right? Now there's protests you can do if a resort comes in and clears all the mangroves and clears all those areas of those natural areas that you can have, you know, you're fun as a tourist. But really be aware as an ecotourist to just be like, I don't want to go to these big resorts that destroy the area. I want to go to a resort or a hotel or a, I guess, an organization or a company that not only has a place where I can enjoy the nature of that area, but also gives back and has an impact on the local community so that when I go there, I'm not taking from the community. I'm actually giving back to the community. There are places that are out there and hopefully we'll have some of those on the podcast soon so that you can find out more about that. But that's an important role as a tourist. That's an important role as a human being to just like everything you do, you could have that impact. It might take a little bit more research, hopefully in the future we'll be able to take away some of that research and make it a little easier for you to choose. But I think that's an important aspect of, you know, looking out for biodiversity, getting involved and taking action. So I'm hoping that this allows you to really enjoy the time and understand how important biodiversity is. This is a time where we need to make sure that biodiversity is protected, that we increase biodiversity in many areas and we stop messing around and stop delaying. We need to hold our politicians accountable. There are some major elections that are happening in the U.S. as well as Canada over the next year. In the U.S. even earlier, I think the next couple of weeks. It's important that we hold our politicians who have been in office for a long time and haven't done anything and refuse to do anything to help nature but help protect biodiversity. But also put in people who are willing to put in the work, who are willing to make the hard decisions and are willing to go outside the norm to protect biodiversity. It's important to you, it's important to me, it's something that it's not a border issue, it's something that every country around the world needs to protect so that we can enjoy the system that we have now or the system that we've had in the past, a nice, stable system that works well for us, that provides us with food and provides us with security. So I hope that helps and, you know, my big call to action is get out, get connected with nature. And I would love to hear your stories of you connecting with nature. You can put a comment in the comments below or you can comment on Spotify, YouTube, or you can send me a DM on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. I would love to hear your stories and how you connect with nature and how you understand biodiversity is extremely important to our natural world. So that's it for me for today's episode, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and learning about biodiversity with me. And of course, if you know someone who you think would benefit from this, please feel free to share this episode. It's free to share. I really appreciate it. But I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.
