The real forces behind biodiversity loss — and what we can do about them

To reverse biodiversity loss, we must rethink our relationship with the natural world, says leading sustainability scientist Belinda Reyers.

Belinda Reyers watches the world with a careful, questioning eye. For decades, she has traced the intricate threads that tie human lives to the landscapes we inhabit, seeking to understand how we might live in balance with nature rather than at its expense.

“The scale and complexity of the problem has outgrown our usual responses,” she explains. While Earth today has a growing number of protected areas, biodiversity loss continues to increase.

Reyers’ work asks a simple yet profound question: what are we truly trying to change to bend the curve of biodiversity loss?

Real drivers of biodiversity loss

Her presentation, “Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss: What Are We Trying to Change?”, questions why, despite decades of conservation effort, the world’s ecosystems continue to unravel.

For Reyers, affiliated with the University of Pretoria and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the answer is embedded in societal as well as ecological factors.

She spoke to Jive Media Africa ahead of the gathering which brings together African researchers and global delegates to spotlight innovative, Africa-led research and transformative solutions focused on conservation, climate resilience, and ecological restoration.

“We’re facing extinction rates that have never been higher in human history,” she says. “And yet, every year, we declare more protected areas, pass more environmental laws, and design more projects.

New school of thought

That mismatch, she argues, lies in how conservation has been framed for much of the past century — as a struggle to keep people out of nature. Reyers is part of a growing school of thought seeking to move beyond that binary. “We need to see people and nature as inextricably intertwined,” she explains. “Not as opposing forces, but as part of the same living system.”

Growing up between Harare and Pretoria, Reyers grew to love the outdoors. She would spend most of her days playing and cycling around her neighbourhood or hiking and camping with her family. She had no other choice anyway. “I’m part of that generation, and that socio-economic group where my childhood was outdoors. We didn’t even have a TV set, so we were always being sent outside,” she says laughingly.

Looking back, she says she had “never really had a plan” for her career and was always quite jealous of her peers at school who knew what they wanted to do, such as becoming a doctor or a teacher.

The degree she graduated with did not exist when she was still in school, but she realized at a young age that she didn’t want an office job. She wanted to be in outdoors, doing things with people, and in pleasant, natural places.

When starting university, she was told she had to choose between a natural or a social science and that she had to pick one major, but she insisted on pursuing both, ultimately leading her into an interdisciplinary field of nature and people, environment and development.

Bending the curve

She says her presentation at this week’s Oppenheimer Research Conference will be a tribute to her late mentor, Prof Georgina Mace, who first introduced the concept of “Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss.” Rather than simply slowing biodiversity decline, the aim should shift to reversing the loss and helping ecosystems recover.

Reyers noted that for the longest time, the world has viewed people and nature as distinct entities. But these days there this a growing recognition that you can’t separate people and nature. “It’s people with nature,” says Reyers.

“But all the things we keep doing — creating new protected areas, passing new laws, writing new action plans — are not touching the root of the problem,” Reyers says. “We can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results.”

For her, the question is no longer what’s being lost, but why. “We talk about pollution, deforestation, and climate change,” she says, “but those are surface-level symptoms. What’s really causing them?”

Deep drivers

A recent report in which Reyer was involved in, together with over 100 experts from 42 countries, traces three deep drivers beneath the crisis.

The first, she says, is humanity’s growing disconnect from nature. “This belief that we can dominate the natural world, that we stand apart from it.”

The second is the concentration of wealth and power. “A small group of people and countries make the biggest decisions and cause the greatest harm,” she explains. “Those least responsible for the damage are often the ones most affected.”

And finally, an economic system obsessed with short-term gains. “Nature is a long game,” Reyers says. “But we keep making choices for now — build the factory, clear the forest, turn a profit — and in doing so, we trade away our future.”

She says these forces do more than just drive biodiversity loss. “They’re the same ones fueling inequality, insecurity, and division,” she says. “Our disconnect from nature mirrors our disconnection from each other.”

Coexistence

Reyers believes that reversing biodiversity loss begins with rethinking our relationship with nature itself. As urbanization pulls people further away from the natural world, she argues that conservation must embrace a more relational approach — one that recognises people as part of nature, not apart from it.

This “people-with-nature” perspective, she explains, isn’t new. It has long guided indigenous and rural communities whose daily lives are interwoven with the land and its rhythms. Studies show that biodiversity thrives on indigenous-managed lands and in places where people maintain strong cultural or spiritual ties to natural spaces — from sacred forests along South Africa’s Wild Coast to Canadian neighbourhoods where residents protect their favourite trees.

Such examples, she says, demonstrate that connection breeds care. “If we think of biodiversity loss as a straight line going down,” she says, “what we’re trying to do is bend that line, not only make it less steep, but make it go upwards making things better rather than just less bad.” The challenge, she notes, is scaling up these deeply local successes into a global model of coexistence.

Innate connections

Her research maps out the underlying causes of biodiversity loss — from overconsumption and inequality to policies that measure progress purely in GDP. “We can’t restore nature without addressing the systems that degrade it,” Reyers says. “This means thinking about governance, trade, even how we define wellbeing.”

Reyers’ perspective was shaped early in her career, when she worked alongside communities whose livelihoods depended on the same ecosystems conservation projects sought to fence off.

“I saw that you can’t tell people to protect biodiversity if they’re struggling to survive,” she recalls. “But when people have agency, when their knowledge and traditions are respected, conservation becomes something they do with nature, not against it.”

This thinking — the “people with nature” framing — seeks to reimagine the relationship entirely. It draws from indigenous knowledge systems as much as ecological science. “There are already pockets of the future around us,” she says, “communities where people and ecosystems thrive together. They’re small and marginalised, but they show what’s possible.”

Passing it on

Reminiscing about her mentor, Reyers stresses the importance of mentorship for young scientists. “It was rare then to have a woman to look up to. Meeting her changed everything. Mace was among the first to champion red lists — the systematic cataloguing of endangered species — but what stood out was how she led.”

The older male scientists around her were often intimidating, their confidence sharp-edged. She was different — brilliant, yes, and later made a Dame (the British honour equivalent to a knighthood, awarded for exceptional service to society) for her contributions to science — but also kind, disarmingly human. At first, Reyers was terrified of her. By the end, they would be laughing together over small mistakes and stories from the field.

Now, she says, it’s heartening to see a world with more diverse mentors — people young scientists can look at and think, I could be like that.

In an academic world that can so easily turn competitive, Reyers has tried to create something gentler: collaborative spaces where people can learn, experiment and grow together. “One of the things I’m proudest of,” she adds, “is that so many of the people I’ve mentored have become good friends. Watching them fly in their own careers has been incredibly rewarding.”

Holding hope

Reyers also recognises that many young scientists, especially women, face unique pressures — balancing family responsibilities, expectations, and the invisible weight of work. “Part of mentorship is just being sensitive to those burdens,” she says. “It’s been wonderful to see science itself begin to change, to see glass ceilings cracking, and to see space being made for mothers, fathers, families, and wellbeing.”

The journey has been rewarding, but there have been challenges and lessons to learn along the way. “Pace yourself,” she says — a lesson learned the hard way, by not doing it. By saying yes too often, taking on too much, burning out, and then crawling her way back just to repeat the cycle. Until, finally, she stopped.

These days, she’s intentional about teaching that same lesson — helping younger scientists learn what to say no to. “We work in such a mission-driven field,” she says. “It’s hard to close the laptop, pick up a book, or spend time with friends when it feels like there’s always more to do.”

For her, balance has become part of the work. So has hope — holding on to it when the news is bad, when progress feels slow, when the planet seems to be slipping further out of reach. “When I was younger, I thought I could save the world,” she says, smiling at the memory. “But you can’t do that alone, or by just working harder.”

Now, she leans on her community — a circle of scientists who remind each other to rest, to laugh, to keep hope alive. “Sometimes hope is a privilege,” she says. “People living through the crisis don’t get to choose it. We hold it for them.”

Hope, for her, isn’t quiet or passive. It walks, runs, breathes. It’s found in the mountain reserve a few kilometres away, where she sometimes escapes for air. “I used to spend weekends doing laundry and catching up on emails,” she says. “It was exhausting. Not much fun.”

She pauses, her voice softer. “Now, I still work hard. But I make time to live.”

• Kemunto Ogutu is a Roving Reporters correspondent. This story was produced with support from Jive Media Africa, science communication partner to Oppenheimer Generations and Research (OGRC).