2008 JD Stewart Address

Professor Barry Brook presented the 2008 JD Stewart Address Averting catastrophe: reasons and ways to tackle climate change on Wednesday 9 July 2008.

For over fifty millennia, and most intensively within the last few centuries, emergent threats to the Earth’s flora and fauna have centred on human agency. Habitat loss and fragmentation (deforestation, logging and burning), over-exploitation (fisheries, specimen collecting), introduced species and diseases (cane toads, avian malaria), pollution (DDT, tannins), and global climate change (warming, CO2, release and ozone layer destruction) are the major factors threatening biodiversity, and have likely contributed to an alarming rise in extinction rates. When species become extinct biological diversity is depleted and evolutionary history and genetic variety is lost. With this extinction of species comes a reduction in ‘ecosystem services’ (such as pollination, water filtration by plants) which are extremely costly or impossible to replace.

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