The combined effects of humanity’s actions are making ecosystems less resistant to change, and threatening the vital ecosystem services humanity relies upon, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience. It’s already well known that humanity is driving myriad systemic environmental changes: altering the climate, converting forests to farmland, polluting the oceans with plastics, diminishing wild species, and much more. Yet scientists have little idea how these different environmental stresses are combining to impact ecosystems. To address this knowledge gap, an international research team analyzed data from more than 1,000 experiments that measured the response of various ecosystems to one, two or three human-caused environmental stressors. The scientists used this data to calculate the resistance of biodiversity and ecosystem services to change — in other words, their ability to remain the same despite multiplying human pressures. The team analyzed experiments that spanned two measures of biodiversity and five ecosystem functions, including soil carbon stocks, plant production, soil fertility, and organic matter decomposition, in response to a variety of human-driven environmental factors, such as climate change, drought, nitrogen pollution, wildfires and overgrazing. They found that the resistance of ecosystem services to environmental change declined as the number of human-caused stressors increased. Statistically, the capacity of ecosystem services to resist change decreased by nearly 10% on average when exposed to two environmental stressors, compared to ecosystems exposed to a single stressor. But when a third stressor was added, resistance was reduced by 36%. This suggests that the combined effect of human-driven stressors…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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