Damian Carrington catalogues the environmental events of 2022 (Environmental review of 2022: another mile on the ‘highway to climate hell’, 30 December), which he sees as symbolising the “climate breakdown that humanity is careering towards”. He rightly notes that it’s not just our climate that’s breaking down catastrophically, but nature wholesale – with the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet report 2022 (it would be better titled the Dying Planet report) recording a 69% loss of all wildlife populations over the past half century.
Over that same 50-year period, our human population has more than doubled – a key driver of both climate change and biodiversity loss conspicuously absent from the article. Not least the event of humanity topping 8 billion last year on 15 November.
Carrington ends by noting the death of James Lovelock, the brilliant scientist behind the Gaia hypothesis and someone who did not shy away from highlighting inconvenient facts, who once said: “Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
Robin Maynard
Executive director, Population Matters
