How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by
Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020
Governments from 72 countries signed a Leaders’ Pledge for Nature in September 2020, promising to address environmental destruction, and ‘reverse’ biodiversity loss by 2030.38 Pledges are very welcome – we like pledges. But our money will help governments keep their word. $ $ $ HUMANS ARE A MAJOR FORCE for homogenisation – a phenomenon also known as ‘McDonald’s-ification’ or the ‘Starbucks Effect’. Essentially we make everything start to look the same. In South America, some 57 genera of megafauna went extinct over a drawn-out period at the end of the last ice age. Megafauna refers to animals over 44 kilogrammes in weight – mostly large mammals, but also some giant birds.