Ask what is driving animals towards extinction and most people name poaching, pollution or climate change. A report from the think tank Chatham House, backed by the UN Environment Programme, points somewhere less dramatic: farming. It found agriculture to be a threat to 86% of the species at risk of extinction.
The number
In February 2021 the London think tank Chatham House published a report called Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss, supported by the UN Environment Programme and the charity Compassion in World Farming.
Its headline finding: agriculture is the identified threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 species at risk of extinction that the report counted. That is 86%.
The report calls the global food system the primary driver of biodiversity loss. It adds that species are now going extinct faster than the average rate of the past 10 million years.
How a field becomes a threat
The main mechanism is space. Over the past 50 years, the report says, converting natural ecosystems into cropland or pasture has been the principal cause of habitat loss. A forest turned into a field has not been damaged. It has been replaced.
What happens on the land afterwards matters too. The report describes a "cheaper food paradigm": producing ever more food at ever lower cost by adding fertiliser, pesticides, energy, land and water. Cheaper food drives demand, demand drives more clearing and more intensive farming, and the cycle repeats.
The food system also accounts for around 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions people produce, so it feeds the climate pressure on wildlife as well.
Three levers
The report does not ask for one thing. It names three, and says they depend on each other:
Eat differently. Shift diets towards more plants and waste less food, which lowers the demand for land.
Leave land for nature. Protect what is still wild, avoid converting more of it, and restore what has been degraded.
Farm more gently. Use fewer inputs and move away from single-crop fields towards mixed farming that leaves room for other species.
Changing diets comes first in that list because it is what makes the other two possible. Land can only be given back to nature if less of it is needed for food.
A note on what this story does not claim
A post shared widely this month pairs the 86% figure with the statement that most farmland exists for meat and dairy. The 86% is exactly what the report says. The UNEP summary we checked does not give a figure for the share of farmland used for animals, so we have not repeated that part here.
It is also worth being clear about what 86% means. It is the share of at-risk species for which agriculture is one identified threat. Many of those species face other threats at the same time.
Why it belongs in a wildlife app
Because it is the one driver of extinction that nearly everyone takes part in, several times a day, and the one where a small change repeated by many people adds up to land.
_Photo: cloud forest cleared for pasture in Pichincha, Ecuador, December 2003. Alex Wild, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons._
_Sources: Benton et al., "Food System Impacts on Biodiversity Loss", Chatham House, 3 February 2021. UN Environment Programme press release, "Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss", 3 February 2021._