The wings of the mourning cloak butterfly (nymphalis antiopa) are soft brown and inky black with bright blue spots, fringed with golden tips like a summer sunset.
An ember on the wind, the purple-edged copper (lycaena hippothoe)’s burning orange wings have unexpected speckles of indigo and bright white edges.
The false heath fritillary (melitaea diamina) has a warm yellow and brown pattern, with fuzzy white and black striped edges that resemble a tuft of tiger fur that sprouted wings and flew away.
As of 2019, all three of these species of butterflies are listed as extinct in the Netherlands. The Dutch Environmental Data Compendium shows that across 19 species groups, at least one third are either threatened or already extinct, including 60% of butterfly species.
Biodiversity loss
Biodiversity is defined by the United Nations as variability among living organisms. Biodiversity loss means losing that variability as species, from butterflies to mammals and everything in between, succumb to extinction.
According to researchers at the University of Utrecht, global biodiversity loss is primarily caused by land use change, like going from wild meadows and woodlands to agricultural or residential use. Other causes include overexploitation (i.e. unsustainable levels of fishing, hunting and harvesting), pollution and climate change.
The researchers distinguish between climate change and biodiversity loss, but these two existential threats are inextricably linked. Land use change, overexploitation and pollution are also contributing directly to climate change getting worse.
The same problem
A recent assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES – an independent panel that advises governments on biodiversity issues) emphasized the interconnected nature of agriculture, biodiversity and climate change, and made the case for treating all of them as the same problem.
A story by The New York Times highlighted how much the report focuses on solutions, like “prarie strips” (areas of native vegetation amid crop rows) and trees on farmland to help with “biodiversity, food production, human well-being, water quality and climate change all at once.”
“Conserving nature requires changes in individual behavior”
Changing farming practices is a form of behavior change. A recent paper in Environmental Science & Policy made the link between individual behavior change and biodiversity. In “National biodiversity strategies under-utilize the potential for individual behavior change”, lead author Julian Rode and co-authors discovered that only 3% of national biodiversity strategies and action plans specified how they could enable individual behavior change.
“With humans at the epicenter of the biodiversity crisis, conserving nature requires changes in individual behavior,” they wrote. “Policy actions targeting individual behavior change were aimed mostly at increasing people’s capabilities (i.e., providing information) or providing opportunities (i.e., resources), and rarely addressed the motivation of individuals.”
“Knowledge to leverage changes in people’s behaviors … is especially important when addressing complex issues like conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems, because traditional efforts to promote environmentally friendly behaviour … may not always be successful.”
The European Union and the United Nations
Top-down laws and intergovernmental organization goals have sought to combat biodiversity loss in recent years. Since August 2024, the EU Nature Restoration Law has been in effect, legally obliging members states to work toward restoring species, habitats and ecosystems.
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals include perserving biodiversity through conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources (SDG 14), and protecting, restoring and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems in order to halt biodiversity loss (SDG 15).
As of 2024, The Netherlands has enshrined biodiversity in various national laws, namely the Nature Protection Act, Environment Act and Fisheries Act. The Dutch National Dashboard for Biodiversity aims to keep track of and faciliate species recovery, ecosystem recovery, improving marine life, reversing declining pollinator populations, and ecosystem services (any positive benefit that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people).
How do people perceive biodiversity loss?
Our colleague Anne van Valkengoed is one of the co-authors of a paper out in the Journal for Nature Conservation which developed a scale to measure how people perceive the reality, causes, and consequences of biodiversity loss.
Lead author Annike Eylering, together with other co-authors Jana Borghorst, Kerstin Neufeld, Lena Szczepanski and Florian Fiebelkorn (all from Universität Osnabrück), sought to answer an increasingly urgent question: How do people perceive the rapid global loss of biodiversity, and what determines their perceptions?
Biodiversity “is the key global indicator of ecosystem functioning and nature’s contribution to people”, the authors write. “By enhancing our understanding of how people perceive biodiversity loss, this study contributes to the broader goal of addressing and mitigating the impacts of the global biodiversity crisis.”
Raising awareness of biodiversity loss, and figuring out how to measure how troubled people are by it, are important steps to being able to move on to the stage of taking action, be it personal or systemic, to stop it from getting worse.
What if we get it right?
In her popular science book “What If We Get It Right?”, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson shares possible solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Each section begins by listing the ten challenges posed by each aspect of climate change and, crucially, ten potential ways to those solve those problems.
In the section on biodiversity, she points out that rewilding croplands and pastures to their natural state “could prevent 60% of expected species extinctions”, and “species biodiversity and abundance are on average 10% and 15% greater, respectively, inside protected areas than outside of them.”
Environmental psychology research is increasingly showing that behavior change can and should play a crucial role in staving off biodiversity loss, and reaffirming that behavior change is a vital tool to help us preserve the ecosystems and species – like the mourning cloak, purple-edged copper, and false heath fritillary – that keep our planet healthy and beautiful.
Photo by Traci White
