After 250 million years, life on Earth is once again in a "mass extinction".

Over the billions of years of the Earth's history, the cloud of extinction has hung over its flora and fauna on many occasions. In an event known as the "mass extinction" 250 million years ago, 961 TP3T of marine species were lost forever.

Currently, the same crisis is once again on the horizon. Last week, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES , IPBES) released a report on the loss of biodiversity that puts this horrific figure is suitably inflated - an estimated one million species will go extinct by 2050. Eschewing the timid pragmatism of technocrats, these scientists called for a total transformation of the global economy. They say that the production-for-profit approach to economic development has been a disappointment, and a disappointment to the planet, and that we need a whole new system.

According to the report's conclusions, only "revolutionary change" can stop mass extinctions. This means overhauling the global economy to prioritize human well-being and environmental sustainability over the pursuit of profits," said Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers, associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University and lead author of the IPBES report. The heartbreaking problem of diminishing biodiversity is rooted in the way we organize our economy, production and consumption, and in our institutions and rules. We need to change the structure of our society to make it more sustainable."

Species are going extinct today faster than ever before, and the reasons are obvious: rapid economic development, global warming caused by fossil fuels, industrial pollution, monocrop agriculture, to name but a few. Despite the complexity of the impact processes, they invariably point to a common culprit: a growth-based economic system bent on extracting money from nature that has exploited the planet's ecosystems beyond its capacity. The Earth's fragile life-support system is now progressively threatening human survival, and no one is able to stop it.

Evidence of an impending species mass extinction has gradually accumulated over the years, but this report gives us a very intuitive picture of the speed and scale of the crisis. Plant and animal species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate: one million of the eight million species known to exist on Earth could be extinct within 30 years. The authors of the report conclude that biodiversity is "declining at the fastest rate in human history". At the same time, the ecological prerequisites for human survival are diminishing: clean air and water, healthy food, a stable climate, medicines, and so on.

Efforts to slow the rate of species extinction are proving to be far from sufficient. In the coming years, governments will not be able to meet the conservation goals they have set for themselves, we will watch countless corals and amphibians die, and as many as 300 million people will face the threat of rampant flooding as coastal habitats disappear - all because governments, businesses and other organizations have failed to get to the root of the problem of ecosystem collapse.

IPBES is careful to remain neutral and offer policymakers a choice. But the report's conclusions are "inherently political," Visseren-Hamakers said. "We're trying to change the goals of society and hopefully shift the goal from profitability to sustainable living."

The authors of the report recommend "moving away from the current short-sighted model of economic growth", although they "anticipate opposition from those with vested interests". Considering that growth is the energizing principle of a market economy, this is essentially a reform of global capitalism, a process that will undoubtedly anger some large corporations.

Like the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the candor of this new study is equally historic. After years of emphasizing piecemeal reforms, the scientific community is now asking us to radically rethink modern society. Not because out of ideology, but out of a scientist's sense of responsibility to be evidence-driven in everything.

 "It was inevitable to come to this conclusion because the science confirms that it is indeed the case," Visseren-Hamakers said.

Of course, the authors also offer less extreme solutions. In this report, they argue that putting a price tag on "ecosystem services" can help people understand the costs of treating nature as a dumping ground. This is not a new idea. Incorporating the value of nature into economic calculations would remove the "perverse incentives" to pollute and give businesses and governments greater incentives to protect biodiversity. Carbon pricing, for example, aims to take into account the value of climate stabilization. In theory, considering the environmental costs of carbon pollution in production decisions should discourage the use of fossil fuels that directly or indirectly damage ecosystems. Although not particularly ambitious, pricing nature was once widely recognized as a pragmatic response to species loss.

Jesse Goldstein, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, said, "Fifteen years ago, the financialization of nature-based programs was the focus of such reports."

Indeed, putting a price tag on "ecosystem services" is less important today and marks a historic shift in policy tone. Pragmatic scientists and policymakers want quick, practical solutions to pressing problems. As a result, they have refused for decades to call for fundamental reform of the economic system. Even if economic growth has clearly accelerated the decline of biodiversity, dominance in global capitalism seems too drastic, cumbersome and unworkable to be considered a realistic solution to this crisis.

Goldstein said, "The key language [of the report] suggests that the time has come to make changes. But our assumption is that large-scale, revolutionary political and economic change takes too much time, and that solutions based on technocratic and technological policies are faster." But at the moment, pragmatic solutions seem disconnected from the reality of the extinction crisis. Given the deadly severity of species extinction, there is a desperate call for ambitious solutions.

It would be reductive to blame modern capitalism solely for the decline in biodiversity. After all, humans have been destroying the environment ever since they learned to cut branches into spears and cut down forests to build farms. But capitalism, which promotes competition and profitability, introduces an entirely different set of incentives: once plant and animal life are seen as acceptable sacrifices for production inputs, cash engines, or the accumulation of profits, it's time to squeeze the lights out of them.

The IPBES report makes it clear that today's mass extinctions differ from earlier declines in biodiversity in kind rather than degree. Since 1900, global populations of major species have declined by 201 TP3 T. Since 1970, nature's productivity has declined across the board as industrial production has exploded. Species extinctions are now "tens to hundreds of times higher than the average for the past 10 million years," the authors write.

In The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert documents the alarming rate of modern ecological destruction. She writes, "Just in the past century, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has changed by one part per million, as much as it normally does during a 100,000-year ice age. At the same time, the decline in ocean pH over the past 50 years is likely to be far greater than the decline in ocean pH over the past 50 million years. Last weekend, temperatures in parts of the Arctic Ocean reached 84 degrees Fahrenheit, while carbon dioxide concentrations exceeded 415 parts per million for the first time in human history. No matter how unsustainable our ancestors' societies were, they couldn't have been worse than we are now."

However, on one side, species are on the verge of extinction, and on the other, the economy is booming. According to the IPBES report, crop production has grown by 300% since the 1970s, and corporations now grab 60 billion tons of resources from the planet every year. These resources are everything: oil for cars, wood for construction, and a wide variety of precious metals. If the decline in biodiversity were an attempt to make life better for everyone - to ensure that everyone has a safe home, healthy food, and reliable transportation - that would be excusable, but instead we're seeing a dramatic widening of the divide between rich and poor. Since the 1970s, the incomes of the wealthiest Americans have doubled, while the working class has experienced wage stagnation while suffering from extreme weather and food shortages.

Goldstein added that given these trends, "it's hard to make the argument that the so-called green capitalist mode of production will save the planet," and that what appears to be needed are more radical measures.

The world's best scientists seem to agree, and Visseren-Hamakers says, "The discourse on sustainability is changing, and it has become rare to argue for sweeping changes that amount to a revolution."