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Opinion | Forget the US-China trade war, mass extinction should be the far bigger story
- A recent study revealed that a million species are at risk of extinction because of the way we abuse the planet and its resources
- Few in the mainstream media and beyond seem to grasp the seriousness of the environmental crisis facing humankind
Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Trade war, trade war, trade war; who cares about the bloody trade war!
A few readers of newspapers and watchers of television news will make or lose money depending on how this “war” is waged, but all that pales into near complete insignificance compared with the news that broke on May 6.
You don’t recall? Well, it was revealed that a million species are now at risk of extinction because of the reckless way in which the human race uses and abuses the planet and its resources.
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And this is no pronouncement from a hit-and-miss analyst sitting in an office, trying to decipher the latest Trump tweet. This is a study compiled for the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by 145 experts from 50 countries.
Most news outlets did mention the study, briefly, but reporting a story out of context is in some ways worse than not reporting it at all.
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Treating the end of life as we know it as just another news story – of lesser importance than Belt and Road, than the extradition agreement, than the trade war – gives the impression that, although there’s a problem, someone, somewhere will sort it out, and there’s no need to worry.
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