Humankind must take responsibility for the planet’s critical situation

Spread over an area of about 170,000 sq. km, the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, stretches across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay and has a rich biodiversity. It is home to one of the world’s biggest populations of jaguars and it has many vulnerable and endangered species, including giant river otters, giant armadillos and hyacinth macaws.
More than 7,600 sq. km of the Brazilian Pantanal has already burned in 2024, as fires have surged to their highest levels since 2020, the worst year on record, The Guardian reported last week. From January to July, blazes increased by 1,500 percent compared with the same period last year.
While, mercifully, there have been few human casualties, unfortunately the same cannot be said of other forms of life. As the region is home to hundreds of millions of animals of thousands of species, the fires have killed a vast number of animals, especially smaller ones.
Many experts believe that the current year could be one of the most devastating in living memory. In 2020, 30 percent of the area caught fire and more than 17 million vertebrates were killed. The number of other species lost is impossible to calculate, but their losses will be felt in the ecosystem for decades to come.
Many of the fires are started by humans, as 90 percent of the Pantanal is privately owned and ranchers start fires to clear the area for their cattle. But due to climate change, the land has become dry and much of the water in the wetlands has evaporated, meaning the fires become uncontrollable.
Unfortunately, the Pantanal is not the only region where animals are bearing the brunt of fires and neither are the increasing number of severe fires the only impact of human activity, whether direct or indirect, on forests and animals.
Floods are an equally big threat and are increasing in frequency and intensity with each passing year, impacting almost every part of the world. Floods also lead to thousands of animals perishing and many of these are from endangered or highly vulnerable species. Moreover, floods can lead to the large-scale destruction of vegetation and, in the dry season, this dead vegetation becomes fodder to feed the fires, thus creating a vicious circle.

The world operates in a perfectly calibrated manner and each living being has a very useful role in preserving the natural balance. 

Ranvir S. Nayar

Various other parts of the world face the same fate, as climate change and rising human activity in ecologically fragile areas lead to the large-scale destruction of biodiversity and killing thousands, if not millions, of animals each year.
The increasing frequency and spread of catastrophic events has brought about a change in perception. While for some of us this has become an issue of major concern, for others, including much of the media, so frequent and so widespread are these extreme events that there has been a degree of “normalization” of them and the severe threat they pose. But they do pose a threat to the survival of not just plants or animals, but life on the planet as a whole, with only those directly involved in these incidents perceiving the devastation that extreme weather is causing and where that will lead.
On the ground, the situation and its impact on animals continues to worsen. According to one study, almost 92 percent of terrestrial mammal communities in the Caatinga, another region in Brazil, located in the northeast of the country, will lose species by 2060 and 87 percent will lose habitat if the temperature in the region increases by 2 degrees Celsius.
Even though, for most of us, these declining populations will remain a distant, almost invisible phenomenon, it would be a monumental error to believe that their impact will not be felt everywhere sooner rather than later.
The world operates in a perfectly calibrated manner and each living being, whether plant, animal or even bacteria, has a very useful role in preserving the natural balance, which of late has become extremely tenuous and fragile, mainly due to human greed and the wanton destruction of the planet.
If the loss of forests and the living beings within them — alongside other ecosystems, notably marine — continues unabated for even a few more years, it is bound to set off a cataclysmic series of events that will have a severe impact on humanity.
Moreover, the mindless destruction that leads to reductions in the populations of various animals or even their extinction has a catastrophic impact on human health, such as through the emergence of new diseases or much more potent forms of existing illnesses.
Other equally harmful impacts on our well-being are far too many to mention here. The onus of doing something to prevent such a catastrophic scenario from becoming a reality falls on humans. Unless we wake up to the critical situation in which the world finds itself today and take responsibility, the fires and floods will continue to take their toll and, in the not-too-distant future, they will kill many more humans, directly or indirectly, than what we have witnessed so far.

• Ranvir S. Nayar is the managing editor of Media India Group and founder-director of the Europe India Foundation for Excellence.