The human footprint and conservation legacy on 22 forms of nature's contribution in tropical reefs

To what extent has humanity degraded ecosystems? This is a crucial question we need to ask ourselves if we are to reconcile our relationship with nature and imagine a more desirable future. Although everyone has heard anecdotal accounts of once-abundant species from previous generations, systematic quantification of ecosystem degradation over time is difficult to achieve due to limited historical data. Instead, it is possible to use the most pristine ecosystems known today to estimate the lower bound of our current impact on nature. By measuring 22 potential contributions of fish communities to nature and people in over 2000 tropical reefs, we have explored the impact of anthropogenic activities and conservation measures on fish communities. By explaining these contributions by more than 40 environmental, habitat and human covariates, we conducted counterfactual scenarios on unprotected and protected reefs to measure the effect of anthropogenic activities and conservation measures on contributions to Nature and People. We show that anthropogenic activities have massively reduced the biomass and diversity of fish communities on tropical reefs, reducing the total measured contributions by an average of 10%. Despite a non-negligible impact on biomass and IUCN species richness, conservation efforts to date have only been able to offset the decline by a few percent. Our results show that despite the undoubted benefits of current protected areas, reef protection cannot and will not compensate for all our extraction, pollution and ecosystem destruction. A change in our relationship with nature is therefore urgent and imperative if we are to imagine an enviable future for nature and people.