Our September 2022 Meeting -  Tackling Climate Change & The 6th Mass Extinction - with Prof. Jim Harris - Thursday, September 15th at 7:30PM

The North End Club, 70 Roff Avenue, Bedford, MK41 7LW

ACOP26 necessarily had a major focus on reducing, eliminating,
and sequestering carbon. Less prominent in the headlines is the crisis in biodiversity – the Sixth Mass Extinction, with the current rate of species loss to be as much as 1 000 times higher than the natural background – caused by us. We have been losing species by habitat loss, unchecked invasive species, overexploitation (extreme hunting and fishing pressure), pollution, and climate change.

The UK itself is in the bottom 10% of biodiversity as a country – with about half of its biodiversity left – compared to the global average of 75%, which itself is nothing to celebrate. The good news is that by increasing biodiversity through ecosystem restoration we can sequester more atmospheric carbon than simply planting rows of non-native tree monocultures.

Prof. Jim Harris, an environmental scientist at Cranfield University, will take us through the science of this complex, but hopeful, prospect.