“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Mark Twain.

Our societal addiction to expansion/inflation is doing neither us nor the natural system any good. A new study by Ma et al (2024) has examined the changing overlaps between humans and 22,374 other vertebrate species from the perspective of both climate migrations and human population expansion.

The result is not pretty, with the spatial overlap predicted to increase (decrease) by 56.6% (11.8%) up to 2070. The changes are driven almost entirely from increasing human density.

Relative changes in species richness in areas of increasing human-species overlap. Orange (blue) indicates decreasing (increasing) species richness.

The orange areas a concentrated across areas with already high population densities and point towards even further decreases in ecosystem services for agriculture as these populations develop.