As governments set sustainability targets over the next decade to combat environmental and climate emergencies, scientists say it’s time we start thinking about the next few million years as well.

“If we continue with the business-as-usual model, we will be facing, sooner or later, the biggest tragedy of the commons in human history – we can reverse this trend.”

Associate Professor Francisco Garcia-Gonzalez, Adjunct Research Fellow at UWA’s School of Biological Sciences

Scientists' warning to humanity for long-term planetary thinking on biodiversity and humankind preservation, a cosmic perspective, published in BioScience, is calling for the global community to beginning planning for the distant but inevitable point at which increased solar activity makes the Earth uninhabitable.

Co-author and Adjunct Research Fellow at UWA’s School of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor Francisco Garcia-Gonzalez, said while it was essential to set short term goals, it was also crucial to consider biodiversity continuing beyond the existence of the planet itself – and to look beyond the planet for answers.

“The question is whether short-term goals and vision will be enough to ensure the preservation of most life forms, including humanity, into the distant future,” he said.

“We advocate for the adoption of a cosmic perspective to conservation, including our own.”

Associate Professor Garcia-Gonzalez and co-authors, Professor Bill Ripple and Dr Aurelio Malo, said in their paper that rather than being seen as a futile end, the reality of the Earth’s demise should trigger thinking on a transglobal level and highlight the need for collective and long-term commitments to allow biodiversity and humanity to go on for as long as possible.

Associate Professor Garcia-Gonzalez said that finding solutions to the long-term future of biodiversity was likely to be a slow and complex process because it required multiple steps at collective levels, global agreements and commitments, major technological breakthroughs, and an extremely long time to test potential remedies. So, the sooner a solution was sought, the better, he said.

“When should we start paying attention, 1000 years before it happens, 10,000 years before? And when would it be too late?”, he said.  

“If we continue with the business-as-usual model, we will be facing, sooner or later, the biggest tragedy of the commons in human history – we can reverse this trend.”