Climate Change, Sustainability Watch Now: The Crisis of Climate-Driven Extinction

Canadian and Hawaiian wildfires; a bleached Great Barrier Reef; flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria; drought in Somalia; and devastating Cyclones across Malawi and Mozambique are just some of the recent climate driven natural disasters rearranging and challenging the ecosystems on which we all depend.
 

The United Nations calls the confluence of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution a “triple planetary crisis.” A million species are at risk of extinction by 2050. Despite global calls to act, the world is suffering increasingly severe and often irreversible impacts of climate change on ecosystems and the life they sustain. Is climate driven extinction unavoidable? What can be done to reverse course, and can we stop biodiversity loss, global warming, and planetary pollution concurrently? What happens if we fail?
 

As part of Penn Climate Week, Perry World House in collaboration with the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media; and the Department of Biology hosted this urgent discussion of the intersection of biodiversity loss and climate change.

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