Extinction: The Facts (2020)

[bunniefuu]

Sir david attenborough: our planet is home

to a seemingly infinite variety of species...

[Bird squeaks] from ocean giants...

To the tiniest insects.

We call this abundance of life biodiversity.

But today it's vanishing

at rates never seen before in human history.

[Men shouting in native language]

news anchor: a u.n. Panel of experts has found

that one million animal and plant species

face extinction.

Woman: it is worse than expected.

This is happening much faster than we have ever seen before.

Woman : today we are the asteroid

that's causing many, many species to go extinct

simultaneously.

Attenborough: the evidence is that unless immediate action

is taken, this crisis has grave impacts for us all.

Woman: we're not just losing nice things to look at.

We're losing critical parts of earth's system.

Man: and it's threatening our food,

our water, our climate. [Thunder]

woman: this year has shown us we've gone one step too far.

[Animals squealing]

attenborough: scientists have even linked

our destructive relationship with nature

to the emergence of covid-.

We're encroaching further and further

every day into wildlife habitat,

and that drives emerging diseases.

Woman : if we carry on like this,

we will see more epidemics

as bad as this, and some of them could even be worse.

Attenborough: the decisions made

as we rebuild our economies are critical.

Man : get it wrong, and we

will be in deeply dangerous territory.

Woman : get it right, and we still have the ability

to pull back and rein in the collapse of biodiversity.

Woman : we have a moment

when we can change our world

and make it better.

This is that moment.

[Birds chirping]

over the course of my life, I've encountered

some of the world's most remarkable species of animals.

Only now do I realize just how lucky I've been.

Many of these wonders seem set

to disappear forever.

We're facing a crisis

and one that has consequences for us all.

It threatens our ability to feed ourselves,

to control our climate.

It even puts us at greater risk of pandemic diseases

such as covid-.

It's never been more important for us to understand

the effects of biodiversity loss,

of how it is that we ourselves

are responsible for it.

Only if we do that will we have any hope

of averting disaster.

In ,

the united nations asked over scientists

to investigate the current state of the natural world.

Woman: this is the first time there's been a global assessment

where all the evidence has been pulled together,

thousands and thousands of papers.

Man: we're losing biodiversity at a rate

that is truly unprecedented in human history.

[Buffalo grunts] willis: all groups

in the natural world are in decline,

which means their populations are getting smaller day by day.

[Squeaks]

man: since ,

vertebrate animals-- things like birds,

mammals, amphibians, and reptiles--

have declined by % in total.

Large mammals have on average disappeared

from / of the range where they were historically found.

Woman: what's different is that it's happening simultaneously

in the amazon, in africa, in the arctic.

It's happening not at one place

and not with one group of organisms,

but with all biodiversity everywhere on the planet.

Watson: it means that one million species

out of million species on earth

are now threatened with extinction--

, plants and animals

and , insects.

Willis: extinction is a natural process.

Things come, they grow, their populations get huge,

and then they decline, but it's the rate of extinction.

That's the problem,

so when you look at previous groups in fossil records,

then it's over millions of years, they go extinct.

Here, we're looking at tens of years.

Attenborough: since ,

plant species

and animal species

have gone extinct.

Studies suggest that extinction is

now happening a hundred times faster

than the natural evolutionary rate,

and it's accelerating.

Willis: globally, there was a shock

because you hadn't pulled all that data together,

that people hadn't realized that we have

a very serious crisis on our hands.

[Crickets chirping]

man: many people think of extinction being

this imaginary...tale

told by conservationists,

but I have lived it.

I know what it is.

[Snorting]

man: I am caretaker of the northern white rhinos.

We only have two left on the planet.

They are mother and daughter.

Good girl.

This is najin,

the mother, who is years old.

She's very quiet.

And her daughter is fatou.

This is fatou. Hey, come on.

Hey, fatou. Fatou, now, come on.

She is years old. Stop it.

She--pretty much like a human teenager.

She's a little bit unpredictable

and can be feisty sometimes,

especially when she wants something.

[Fatou snorts]

attenborough: northern white rhinos were once found

in their thousands in central africa,

but were pushed to the brink of extinction

by habitat loss and hunting.

By ,

just known individuals survived.

I have seen these beautiful rhinos

count from down to .

[Snorting]

mwenda: they are here because we've betrayed them.

And I think they feel it,

this threatening tide of extinction

that is pushing on them.

They feel their world is collapsing.

Unless science saves them,

when najin passes away,

she will leave the daughter,

fatou, alone forever...

The last northern white rhino.

And their plight awaits one million more species.

Hadly: once we lose these species,

we do not have hope

of accumulating them back

on a timescale that we exist on.

[Animal trilling]

attenborough: unique animals with complex and varied lives

disappearing from our planet forever

isn't just disturbing, it's deeply tragic,

but this is about more than losing the wonders of nature.

The consequences of these losses for us as a species

are far-reaching and profound.

Willis: what we now know about the natural world

is that everything is joined up...

From a single pond to the whole tropical rainforest.

All of biodiversity is interlocked

on a global scale, and all parts of that system

are required to make it function.

We tend to think that we're somehow outside of that system,

but we are part of it,

and we are totally reliant upon it.

Watson: the problem is we're now changing

those ecological systems on a massive scale

right across the globe...

And its threatening food and water security.

We're losing many of the things that nature provides for us.

Watson: one of the big threats is the loss of insects.

We've estimated % are at risk of extinction.

Other scientists believe the number could be much larger.

Hadly: driving around, we don't have moths,

butterflies, bees,

all sorts of insects in our windshield anymore.

And that is scary

because they form the food chain

for hundreds of thousands of other species,

and they are extremely important for pollination.

Attenborough: three-quarters of the world's food crops

rely partly on pollination by insects

to produce the food that we need.

Man: another threat is

the loss of diversity below ground.

Soil should be teeming with life,

but reports have suggested that up to %

of the land's surface globally has been degraded

and has soils of low biodiversity.

One of the most important things that animals

in the soil do is break down organic matter...

Which can then be used for plant growth...

So if we lose diversity of the soil,

the consequences of that can be catastrophic.

♪

Watson: we're seeing already that, due to soil degradation

and changes in the earth's climate,

food production in some parts of the world is going down.

Unfortunately, the most affected

would be poor people in developing countries,

but there's no question everybody in the world,

one way or another, is being affected

by the loss of biodiversity.

[Birds chirping]

willis: one of the really big problems

is what's happening to plants.

The picture is grim.

% Of the plant species that have been assessed

are threatened with extinction--

one in plants.

I find that terrifying.

Plants underpin almost every single thing that we require.

Think of the air we breathe,

concentration of co in the air,

clean water.

[Thunder]

trees regulate water flow across landscapes,

intercept the rainfall,

and the roots hold the soil in place...

[Crash]

so you chop all those trees down,

there's nothing doing that.

You end up with a landslide.

[Crash]

we've learnt that many, many times,

and yet we carry on making the same mistake.

[Rumbling]

attenborough: the impacts of biodiversity loss

are no longer a threat for future generations to face.

We ourselves must do so.

It's never been more critical for us

to understand what is driving this crisis.

Scientists have identified the key ways

in which we humans are destroying the ecosystems

on which we depend.

♪

Hadly: there are many ways to remove pieces of the puzzle.

The most obvious way is to k*ll something,

and we do a lot of that.

[g*nsh*t]

[rhinoceros grunts]

[g*nsh*t]

attenborough: over the last years,

the ill*gal wildlife trade has become

a multibillion-dollar, global industry.

♪

Woman: one of the biggest-ever hauls,

worth more than £ million...

Man: pieces were seized.

Woman: ...was found in a shipping container.

Mwenda: poaching is still sort of like a w*r,

a constant battle that we have to fight.

Every day, we lose between two or rhinos in africa,

and it is not just rhinos.

Woman: we're talking about millions of animals

being snatched from the wild from thousand of species.

Mwenda: the ill*gal wildlife trafficking ranks fourth

of the transnational crimes

after human trafficking, arms, and drugs.

Woman: one of the drivers for increasing demand

is increased income in china, vietnam, or elsewhere.

If you have money, if you have internet,

you can literally order anything that you want.

It could be a status symbol,

or it could be for medicinal purposes...

[Man speaking chinese]

h*: but it's all made up.

People claim these are cultures and traditions,

but a lot is really just marketing scheme

by traders looking for the next animal to exploit.

Attenborough: today the most trafficked animal in the world

is one few people have ever seen

and many have never even heard of.

♪

Pangolins are nocturnal animals

found throughout asia and africa.

They're natural pest controllers.

Each one can consume million ants a year.

Pangolins are the only mammal covered in scales,

and this is their downfall.

Woman: the massive demand in asia for pangolin scales

is driving the decimation of pangolins.

h*: traders claim that they have medicinal purposes,

but, you know, pangolin scales are made of keratin.

It's like our fingernails,

so they have no medicinal properties.

All right, sweetheart.

Woman, voice-over: the numbers of african pangolin scales

that have been intercepted going into asia

has dramatically increased over the last few years.

In , it was just over a hundred tons of scales.

That's , pangolins

that have been k*lled for the scale trade.

We work closely with law-enforcement officials.

This little pangolin came in off the trade,

and they're usually dehydrated and emaciated.

This pangolin's still got the little, white tips

at the end of each scale, which shows his youth,

and this is a particularly pretty, little pangolin.

Wright, voice-over: poaching is a brutally cruel business.

I have seen video footage of them being boiled alive.

It's extremely distressing

to see how these animals are k*lled.

♪

Man: when covid- first emerged,

pangolins were pointed to as a potential source of the virus,

and everybody hoped that this would cut down the trade

straightaway, but, unfortunately,

that's not happened.

The trade is highly profitable, and it's unlikely to stop.

h*: there are asian pangolin species and african,

and all species are threatened with extinction.

♪

Attenborough: there is another huge trade

that is driving the loss of biodiversity,

and this one happens in plain sight.

♪

Man: we have created a database

that has world fisheries' statistics,

and we were the first ones to study fisheries

on a global basis, and this global view

shows that we have massive and widespread overfishing.

Attenborough: in the last years,

the scale of global fishing has dramatically increased.

At any one time, there could be as many

as , trawlers operating in our seas.

Man: modern fishing is an industrial operation

run by huge corporations.

Boats are factory ships.

Some sweep up the ground with a net

that might be as big as this house,

and you can put jumbo jets in the mouth of a big trawler,

and everything that is in the path goes in.

Woman: the problem is, as you remove more and more

of the adult fish, particularly the larger-sized fish,

you end up with fewer and fewer of the eggs and the fry,

and there's simply not enough for the population to recover.

There are ways of sustainably managing fish stocks.

Reducing fishing in an area

can get a population back to sustainable levels.

Pauly: but you have to choose whether you want

to extract a sustainable, modest catch

or have a big catch for a short term,

and we have always opted

for the big catch for a short term.

Watson: even where fish quotas are put in place,

often, they're not being implemented,

and in some parts of the world, there's not even

good regulations to limit the catches.

Purdy: the waters around major fishing countries

are being emptied.

We found that in china, we have about % left

of what we had years ago,

and studies suggest that some british waters

where industrial fishing begun have been decimated.

There is now about % of trawler-caught fish left

than before the turn of the th century.

Jones: this is a really big problem for the species of fish

that prey upon the fish that we're harvesting,

and this has huge impact on the marine ecosystems.

Watson: we're completely destroying the natural balance

of fish in the world's oceans.

[Car horns honking]

attenborough: across the globe, the pressures faced

by the natural world are becoming ever harder to solve

because of our growing demand for nature's resources.

Man: when I was a kid in the s,

there were billion people in the world,

so I watched it go to billion, around or so,

and I'm now probably going to see it actually reach,

you know, billion in my lifetime,

which is pretty startling.

Butchart: population growth is much, much higher

in the developing world than in the developed.

Naeem: but it's problematic to just talk about population

because there are two things which are going on.

It's population, but it's also consumption.

Butchart: and in terms of impact on the planet,

what's much more important

is the growth in consumption levels,

and these are far higher in the developed economies.

Naeem: that's why I call it a taboo topic,

because who's at fault?

Is it the very large number of people

or the small number of people with very few children

who are actually driving negative impacts?

Attenborough: the average person in the uk

consumes nearly times the resources

of the average person in india,

and in the united states, it's about times as much.

♪

One of the problems is that many of the products we use

are manufactured in ways

that pollute our air, land, and water, making pollution

another of the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Watson: while in a country like the united kingdom,

we have some very strong laws on how to reduce pollution,

we do have to realize,

we're no longer a major industrial country.

Most of the things that we actually use

are produced abroad in countries

where the laws can be nonexistent or not implemented,

so we're simply moving our footprint

on destroying nature to another country.

Attenborough: pollutants can have a lasting impact

on species, an impact that may take time

for us to fully understand.

Man: pcb stands for polychlorinated biphenyls.

They're used in the electrical industry.

We invented them in the twenties,

and then we began to ban them from the eighties onwards

because we realized they had quite a serious

and toxic effect on life.

They affect the immune system,

and they also cause reproductive impairment.

If pcbs are not disposed of appropriately,

then you can get leaching out from the landfill site

into river courses, riverbeds, back out to sea.

Animals at the base of the food chain

might absorb a very small amount.

Then as animals above them eat more and more

of the small animals, they'll concentrate up the food chain.

♪

In the uk, we have one really striking example of that--

the last remaining pod of inshore k*ller whales

up in northwest scotland,

where they only have individuals left.

That population has been studied for about years.

In all that time, they have never had a calf.

Lulu was a part of that pod.

She died due to entanglement in fishing gear...

And when we had her blubber levels analyzed for pcbs,

they were quite shocking, one of the highest levels

ever recorded of any k*ller whale on the planet,

and we looked at her ovaries,

and we found they were nonfunctional.

In my lifetime, we're looking potentially

at the complete loss of that population,

and then we'll have no more k*ller whales left

around the coast of the uk.

Attenborough: in addition to these threats,

many ecosystems are increasingly feeling the impact

of another driver of biodiversity loss--

climate change.

[Siren]

our world is getting hotter.

Watson: at this moment, we do have the paris agreement

that says all governments should try and limit

climate change to no more than two degrees celsius.

All of the calculations show

we're on track for a - to -degree world,

and the more the earth warms, the worse the problem is.

Man: there are lots of ways that climate change

will impact on species-- changing food sources,

how they breed,

and their whole patterns of migration and movement.

Attenborough: increasing temperatures mean some species

are unable to survive in their normal habitat.

They're forced to move higher and higher, where it's cooler,

and eventually, there's nowhere left to go.

Hadly: it's been called the escalator to extinction,

and we see it all around the globe.

[Birds chirping]

williams: in the australian wet tropics,

we're already seeing that with possums and birds

that just can't handle the heat waves.

About % of the endemic species that live

in these mountaintops are on that escalator to extinction.

These are no longer predictions.

We are seeing it happen.

Attenborough: scientists predict that in the future,

as temperatures continue to rise,

climate change will become

the greatest threat faced by species...

♪

But right now, the single biggest driver

of biodiversity loss is the destruction of habitats.

[Chainsaw whirring]

[crash]

jones: many people imagine there's

this untouched wilderness because they see it

on their tv screens, but the reality is,

there's really not a lot of wild left out there.

We've already lost nearly %

of the wetlands around the world.

We've transformed the forests, our grasslands.

We've converted % of the land that is not covered by ice.

Naeem: / of the terrestrial surface has been changed,

a lot of it just to feed one species.

♪

Man: obviously, if you clear a rainforest

or natural savannah and you replace it

with a monoculture agriculture, of course--it's unsurprising--

you're going to lose most of the species

that evolved to survive there.

The critical thing is that there is now

enough land that's already been cleared

to sustain the levels of production that we need,

but new land is still being cleared

because often, it's quicker and cheaper to do so.

[Fire crackling]

attenborough: it's estimated that every year,

around . Million hectares of forest are cleared.

Gardner: a lot of that clearance is driven

by demand on the other side of the world.

We want cheap food, and we want to have choice

on offer all year round.

Attenborough: these commodities often provide

the mainstay of countries' economies,

but many are produced in ways that are not sustainable.

Gardner: so a consumer walking into a supermarket

may unwittingly be contributing towards loss of biodiversity.

What we're doing is taking customs data, shipping data,

and for the first time, we connect them all together

and ask, "who's buying from the hotspots

where we're really losing biodiversity?"

We now have enough data to be able to identify

the main drivers of biodiversity loss--

soy, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, and beef.

Attenborough: conversion of land for cattle

is probably the greatest single cause of habitat loss.

Of the total mass of mammals on earth,

livestock has been found to account for %,

humans for %, and wild animals just %.

♪

The unprecedented impact we are having on the planet

is not only putting the ecosystems we rely on at risk.

Scientists believe that our destructive relationship

with nature is actually putting us

at greater risk of pandemic diseases.

Daszak: we've seen an increasing rate

of pandemic emergence.

We've had swine flu, sars, ebola,

and we've actually looked back over every emerging disease

and said, "where did it originate on the planet,

"and what are the things going on there

that could have caused it?"

And we found we're behind every single pandemic,

and it's human impact on the environment

that drives emerging diseases.

Animals have lots of different viruses

that circulate inside their bodies just like we do,

and so one of the most obvious ways that we're making it

more likely that a virus would jump

is that we're having lots of contacts with animals.

Daszak: the wildlife trade is at unprecedented levels.

We have huge markets with tens of thousands of live animals

shedding their viruses through feces and urine

being k*lled in front of you.

These are incredible places for viruses to spread...

[Dog barking]

and we're connected to that trade

through the things like the fashion industry.

We've seen this huge increase in the use of fur trims

for winter jackets,

and that means hundreds of thousands of animals

are bred in fur farms.

Keesing: you have large densities of animals

put in a situation with a lot of people.

To make things worse, those animals are very stressed,

and we know that animals that are stressed

shed viruses at higher rates.

♪

Daszak: what also drives emerging diseases...

Is that we're encroaching further and further every day

into wildlife habitat.

[Man shouts]

daszak: % of all emerging diseases have originated

through the process of land-use change.

Forests around the world, where there's a lot of biodiversity,

have thousands of viruses

that we've never come into contact with yet.

The minute we build a road in there,

we start getting exposed.

The first people into those logging camps

go out and hunt bush meat and pick up the viruses.

That's how hiv emerged. Then we bring our livestock in.

Viruses move from wildlife into livestock into people.

At every step of the process, we're bringing people

closer in contact with wildlife and their viruses.

It's easy to imagine that we're so far away

from these diseases' origins

that it's nothing to do with us,

but we drive it, actually.

Our consumption of beef drives this.

Our consumption of poultry and the products

that are used in poultry drives this.

♪

Keesing: my research is showing that when humans

convert habitat, there is also something else at play.

It's not all species that are likely to make us sick.

Often the best reservoirs for the pathogens

that can jump to humans are smaller-bodied species,

like rats and mice and certain kind of bats.

When we have intact natural systems with high biodiversity,

these species are kept in check,

but when humans destroy habitat,

the large predators and herbivores disappear first,

which means the smaller-bodied species are the big winners.

They proliferate wildly.

They live at super high density

and are the ones far more likely to make us sick.

Daszak: so we've been saying for -plus years

that this exploitation of our environment

is driving pandemics...

♪

But what we didn't think was,

it was going to happen so quickly and so devastatingly.

Attenborough: since the first cases of covid-

were identified in china

and linked to a wet market in wuhan,

scientists around the world have been piecing together

where and how the virus emerged.

Keesing: it was figured out quickly

that it was a coronavirus.

Those are known to reside in various kinds of animals,

and so people started looking for the animal

from which that coronavirus would have jumped into people.

[Bats chirping]

daszak: we found the closest relative to the virus

in bats in rural south china in yunan province.

It's really well-known for its biodiversity of plants

and of animals, including bats,

and they live in these incredibly complex colonies.

One part of the colony is a nursery

where all the kids live,

and the parents fly out every night to get food,

but yunan has been under incredible change

for the past few decades.

High-speed rail links have gone in there.

Roads have been built into remote areas,

and so we think covid- maybe started there,

and either somebody got infected and traveled

to wuhan themselves or sent animals that they were shipping

into the wildlife trade into those wet markets,

and then the virus exploded from there.

[Siren]

we don't know exactly what happened yet,

but it's my view that it's our relationship with nature

and the way we interact with it

that drove the emergence of covid.

Keesing: we've been changing biodiversity

in really critical ways

that made this more likely to happen.

Attenborough: if we continue on our current pathway,

then what we've experienced in

might not be a one-off event.

Daszak: we estimate there are going to be

new emerging diseases affecting people every year.

We cannot live with that and the rate

at which they're increasing and crashing our economies.

If we have one of these every decade,

we cannot persist with that level.

[Birds chirping]

attenborough: we face a frightening future.

So how has it come to this?

Why haven't we acted sooner to address these issues

and stem the loss of biodiversity?

[Whistles and percussion playing]

watson: many scientists, including myself,

have been saying for the last to years

that biodiversity is being lost due to human action.

Man: thousands arrive for the largest u.n. Meeting ever held

in an effort to prevent drastic and irreversible changes.

Suzuki: I'm here to speak for the countless animals

dying across this planet.

We are a group of - and -year-olds

come to tell you adults you must change your ways.

[Applause]

watson: in at the earth summit,

a convention was signed to protect biodiversity.

It was recognized to be of critical importance

to the future of earth.

The bleak warning from scientists

as a major u.n. Conference in japan...

Watson: in , governments came up with targets

to protect biodiversity.

While we're making some progress, to be quite candid,

we probably will not meet any of the targets.

Hadly: part of the problem is that we don't have

really good environmental laws that are global.

Watson: also, unfortunately, many in the private sector

make a huge profit at the expense of our natural world.

They want the status quo to exist.

Hadly: the reality is, our world is based

on economic growth, grabbing more and more.

[Siren]

jared huffman: thank you for joining us

to examine the extinction crisis.

The evidence is unequivocal.

Watson, voice-over: even today, there are people

that will do anything in their power

to make sure that the politicians do not act.

Marc morano: I'm here to tell you that the lead authors

here from the u.n. Are part of this con

that the united nations presents itself

as "the world's" expert on science.

Watson, voice-over: at recent congressional testimony,

two of the republican witnesses argued

that the loss of biodiversity was nowhere near as serious

as what we were saying in the report.

As with the manufactured climate crisis,

they are using the specter of mass extinction

to scare the public into compliance.

Watson: we've wasted to years

when the governments of the world,

working with the private sector,

could have done a much better job conserving biodiversity.

♪

If we've had acted more seriously,

many species could have been saved,

and we would not be facing such serious threats

as we're seeing today.

[Birds chirping]

attenborough: this year has shown the vulnerability

of our societies.

Will we take the opportunity, finally, to change our course?

What can governments, industries,

and we, as individuals, do

to slow this decline of the natural world?

♪

Keesing: the world has been on pause during the pandemic,

and as we begin to move forward,

we have a moment when we can change the way

we're running our world and make it better.

This is that moment.

Man: the first thing that we have to do

is to reset the way we run our economies.

Different man: the massive hit to the economy is no surprise.

Man: the world is in a recession.

Governments are recognizing that they have to invest

to drive out of it, and I've been involved

in a study with the finance ministries

and the central bank governors of the world

in thinking through

what the best ways out of this crisis are,

and we found that those investments

which are good for the environment

are very powerful ways out of the depression

that we find ourselves in, so, for example,

we could begin work on restoring degraded land.

We can plant trees.

We can start retrofitting buildings

so they're much more efficient,

make our cities much cleaner.

All those examples can be done quickly.

They are labor-intensive

and are strong economic multipliers,

so exactly the kind of things you need for a strong recovery.

There are all these things we know we have to do

for biodiversity and for the climate,

so let's bring them forward to this period of unemployment,

and then going forwards, we need to dramatically change

the damage that we do from producing and consuming.

That's the big prize.

♪

Man: at the moment, nature is coming as a free good.

We use rivers and estuaries as sinks

for the pollution we create from industry,

and who's paying for that?

Large chunks of the rainforests have been converted

at prices which are astonishingly low,

given the cost to the rest of the world.

As an economist, I think it's right

that people who extract from nature pay the due price.

Watson: we have to recognize that nature has true value

that is taken into consideration

in national accounts.

[Crash]

we also need to start producing affordable food

without expanding any further into the forests.

This is indeed quite possible.

One of the biggest problems is incredible.

We actually waste about % of the food that is produced.

Dasgupta: if a farmer can't produce stuff

in exactly the right form, he has to throw it away,

and, of course, we throw it away from the plate.

Watson: if we could reduce that food waste,

it would go a long, long way to making

a more sustainable agricultural system,

and also, we need to reduce the amount of chemicals.

We've got to make sure we're not degrading our soils.

We need the best of the private sector to show the others

they can make a profit and still conserve nature.

Hadly: another possible solution is to make more rules.

There does have to be some standard.

We can't simply depend upon people of goodwill

and institutions of goodwill to do what is needed to be done.

If governments impose legislation that says,

"we will not be allowing the imports of products

that are produced in an unsustainable way,"

then it levels the playing field.

Leshy: lots of people don't like government regulation,

but there are some tremendous success stories

of international legal cooperation.

Back in the s, scientists figured out

chemicals used in aerosol spray or used in refrigerants

were actually eating the ozone layer.

Man: about a million tons of cfcs are produced every year.

Leshy: the nations of the world got together,

and they banned these chemicals,

and the problem was solved because

once the manufacturing companies started looking

for alternatives, they found them quite quickly,

so we shouldn't be demoralized

because we know how to do this stuff.

It's a question of finding the political will to do it.

Stern: we shape the future of the planet irretrievably

by the decisions we take in this next few years

and indeed in the months now

as we come out of the covid crisis.

♪

Jones: for those of us who care about the future of our planet,

you know, we have to look at our lifestyles,

and we can't look away from our own behaviors.

Dasgupta: years ago, people consumed

a good deal less in the united kingdom,

but there is no evidence

that we were unhappier then than we are now.

Hadly: we can be more diligent about thinking

about what we're consuming and when.

Willis: it's really digging down,

saying, "what's going on here? Where does that come from?"

Jones: we need to think about meat and dairy consumption.

Gardner: that's not to say that none of us should ever eat meat

or should cut all dairy out of our diets,

but we have to demand that they are produced sustainably.

Dasgupta: increasingly, I feel,

it's not just about our current lifestyle,

but about the education of our children

on the way nature works.

[Animal whimpers]

mwenda: there's a wave of revolution going around,

especially with young people.

We are waking up.

We're realizing that the planet

is an integral part of our existence.

Watson: if we don't act now, the youth of today

and the youth of tomorrow are going to look back

on this generation with absolute horror.

"What were you thinking?"

I want to tell her that we have taken the lessons,

that we will not allow

any other species to walk this tragic road of extinction.

♪

Attenborough: one thing we do know is that

if nature is given the chance, it can bounce back.

Years ago, I had

one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

I was in the virunga mountains--

which straddle the borders of uganda,

the democratic republic of congo, and rwanda--

and there I met some of the few remaining mountain gorillas,

including a mischievous youngster called poppy.

[Birds chirping]

[thumping] [chuckles]

attenborough: as I sit here, there's more meaning

and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance

with a gorilla

than any other animal I know.

Attenborough: as I was preparing to talk to camera,

poppy was at my feet trying to take off my shoes.

♪

It was an experience that has stayed with me,

but it was tinged with sadness, as I thought

I might be seeing some of the last of their kind.

[Thumping]

woman: in the s, this population of mountain gorillas

was estimated to be around individuals in this area.

They were on the brink of extinction.

Their habitat was under very rapid conversion

from forest to agricultural fields.

Attenborough: this part of rwanda was one of the poorest

and most densely populated in the country,

and the expansion of agriculture

was the only way for most people to survive.

Man: there were tensions

between the park and communities.

We had many poachers coming,

setting out snares, cutting bamboo.

Masozera: co-existence of humans and mountain gorillas

really wasn't a reality that many people saw...

But over the next few decades,

the situation would start to change.

Government in all countries, conservation organizations,

and local communities started to work together

with an emphasis not just on the gorillas,

but on the people that lived with them.

Uwingeli: we have over rangers, and their jobs

is to see every gorilla and check on the habitat,

and since , the government set up

a tourism revenue-sharing scheme.

Masozera: a portion of the price that a tourist pays

is actually reserved for those communities adjacent.

Uwingeli: [chuckles]

masozera: the result is that the conversion of habitat

for agricultural production actually ceased,

and the population has recovered.

Uwingeli: I think they are...

[Continues indistinctly]

uwingeli, voice-over: babies were born in this park

last year, and we know that these figures

are going to grow.

No one will be a victim of poachers,

so things have changed.

Masozera: their numbers have just reached

and exceeded ,.

This change has not happened overnight,

but if it can be achieved here--

where human-population pressure is so high,

where the politics can be very complicated,

especially among different states--

I believe it can be achieved elsewhere, as well.

♪

Poppy grew up

and actually was a very long-lived mountain gorilla

and had many offspring.

Masozera: wait. Wait, wait, wait.

Uwingeli: urarabu is right there,

right there, the two.

Uwingeli, voice-over: urarabu is actually

the daughter of poppy.

He's trying to nudge her.

Uwingeli, voice-over: "urarabu" means flower.

She is a shining flower in this park.

Masozera: urarabu also has a daughter.

Uwingeli: urarumbuke. Prosperity.

♪

[Birds chirping]

attenborough: to see poppy's daughter

and granddaughter thriving is thrilling.

It just shows what we can achieve

when we put our minds to it.

I do truly believe that together,

we can create a better future.

I might not be here to see it,

but if we make the right decisions

at this critical moment, we can safeguard

our planet's ecosystems, its extraordinary biodiversity,

and all its inhabitants.

What happens next is up to every one of us.

♪