Err neg---we don’t know how much biodiversity loss it takes to hit tipping points that cause extinction.
Dr. Dave Goulson 22, professor of biology at University of Sussex, holds a PhD from Oxford Brookes University, was given the Zoological Society of London’s Marsh Award for Conservation Biology in 2013; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013; given the British Ecological Society Public Engagement Award in 2014; given Zoological Society of London’s Clarivate Award for Communicating Zoology in 2020, “Industrialized Farming Has Unleashed an Insect Apocalypse”, https://truthout.org/articles/industrialized-farming-has-unleashed-an-insect-apocalypse/
Our planet has coped remarkably well so far with the blizzard of changes we have wrought, but we would be foolish to assume that it will continue to do so. A relatively small proportion of species have actually gone extinct so far, but almost all wild species now exist in numbers that are a fraction of their former abundance, subsisting in degraded and fragmented habitats and subjected to a multitude of ever-changing man-made problems. We do not understand anywhere near enough to be able to predict how much resilience is left in our depleted ecosystems, or how close we are to tipping points beyond which collapse becomes inevitable. In Paul Ehrlich’s “rivets on a plane” analogy, we may be close to the point where the wing falls off.