The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment brought the scale of nature loss into public view. Its deeper challenge was to change the systems that make loss feel normal.
In May 2019, the IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services gave the world a sentence that travelled everywhere: around one million species were threatened with extinction, many within decades. The number was shocking, but the report was not simply a catalogue of loss. It was the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, bringing together evidence on ecosystems, species, the benefits nature provides to people, and the direct and indirect drivers of decline. Its central message was that nature was declining at rates unprecedented in human history, and that incremental fixes would not be enough.
For conservation organizations, the report posed a difficult but necessary question. If decades of protected areas, species programs, environmental laws and public education had not halted the overall decline, what was missing? The answer was not that these efforts were pointless. Many have saved places, species and livelihoods. The answer was that conservation cannot be isolated from the ways food is produced, energy is generated, cities expand, goods are traded and power is distributed. Biodiversity is not an optional sector beside the economy. It is the living foundation beneath it.
The assessment identified five direct drivers of biodiversity loss: changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species. Behind those drivers sit systems of production and consumption, governance, incentives and values. That framing matters because it moves the conversation away from blaming individual communities for environmental decline. A smallholder farmer, a coastal fisher or a pastoral family often has little control over the market, policy or historical pressures shaping their choices. Conservation that ignores these conditions can become punitive, asking those with the least power to carry the greatest burden.
The report also made a stronger case for recognizing Indigenous Peoples and local communities as part of the answer. Across the world, communities have developed practices of care, rules of access, seasonal knowledge and collective institutions that help sustain biodiversity. Recognition should not be reduced to a photograph in a report or a brief consultation. It means respect for rights to lands, waters and resources; meaningful participation in decision-making; and support for community-led conservation on terms set by the people involved. It also means accepting that some knowledge is sensitive and should not be extracted for public databases or commercial use.
This is where the language of transformative change becomes useful. Transformation does not mean every place needs an identical new model. It means questioning the assumptions that produce repeated harm: that economic growth can be separated from ecological limits; that conservation is best achieved by excluding people; that data belongs automatically to the institution that collects it; or that the value of a forest can be captured only through timber, carbon or tourism. Transformation may look like secure tenure, a community seed bank, a restored watershed, a procurement policy that rewards sustainable production, or a planning process in which residents have real power.
The public response to the 2019 assessment was understandably anxious. Yet anxiety alone is not a strategy. The useful response is to connect the global warning to places where people can act together. Protect and restore habitat, certainly. But also support local food diversity, reduce damaging incentives, strengthen public environmental institutions and defend the people who speak up for land and water. Ask whether conservation projects improve both biodiversity and community security. Ask whether monitoring can reveal harm as well as success. The report did not ask us merely to care more about nature. It asked us to reorganize the relationship between nature, power and everyday life.
The lasting value of the 2019 assessment is its refusal to let conservation remain marginal. It requires funders, governments, businesses and civil society to examine the assumptions behind decisions that appear unrelated to nature. It also gives local organizations a clear mandate to ask more of every project: is it reducing pressure or merely moving it? Does it recognize existing stewardship? Does it strengthen community control of data and land? These questions translate a global assessment into an everyday practice of accountability.
The report also helped clarify why stories matter. Statistics can reveal the scale of decline, but people act when they can connect those numbers to the places that sustain them: a pollinator in a garden, a wetland that filters water, a forest that supplies food and medicine, a coastline that shelters a community. Good environmental communication should make those connections without oversimplifying them. It should show that biodiversity is not a luxury for distant reserves. It is the web of relationships that makes farms productive, water cycles reliable and cultures rooted in place.
Program’s grow-outs of crops from the NS/S seed bank. A new seedling house with phytosanitary protocols ensuring disease-free seedlings is, therefore, critical. Some seedlings are grown from seeds that are endangered so there is a need to ensure that the seeds can be multiplied from healthy plants. The green house also provides a season extension function so that crops that may need a longer growing season than the Patagonia site normally provides, have an improved chance of producing seed in the field.
In addition to the season extension function, the green house will provide climate mitigation for seed crops and for food production. This is an ever more important function in this time of changing and extreme climate. The unheated hoop house type of greenhouse will use only solar energy and ventilation to control the conditions inside the structure. This type of inexpensive, energy efficient, structure is widely used in agriculture today. These efficiencies are transferable to a wide geographic area, urban areas, and to different scales of food production.
