Ocean acidification and biodiversity loss: Connecting the dots with data

The world is living through a biodiversity crisis. The rapid pace at which animal and plant species have declined in recent decades has led some experts to declare that another mass extinction is under way. What distinguishes this from previous periods of accelerated biodiversity loss are its causes. Whereas naturally occurring events—some sudden and cataclysmic, others more gradual—were the triggers in pre-historic times, human actions are the root cause of species decline today. They include over-hunting, over-fishing and over-farming, but potentially the most devastating in the long term is climate change brought about by our unrelenting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Ocean acidification and biodiversity loss: Connecting the dots with data is a report written by Economist Impact for Back to Blue, an initiative of Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation. The purpose of this report is to highlight the need for ocean scientists to prove causal links between ocean acidification (OA) and damage to marine species, and the challenges involved in doing so.