In our first post of the new @OurWorldInData biodiversity series I look at the long-term decline of the world's mammals.

Since the rise of humans, wild land mammals have declined by around 85%.

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https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

We can split this into two phases.

First, our hunter-gatherer ancestors helped drive many of the world's megafauna to extinction through hunting.

What's crazy is that there were fewer than 5 million people in the world at the time. The per capita footprint was huge.

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Then with the onset of agriculture, human pressures on wild mammals really increased due to the expansion of agricultural land.

Agriculture & livestock saved some from hunting. But came at the cost of their habitats.

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But I think there is a possible future where humans and wild mammals can both flourish.

To do this we need to reduce the land we use for agriculture, giving back natural habitats.

This means shifting meat production from the field to the lab. And higher crop yields.

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This is just one part of our new @OurWorldinData work on Biodiversity.

You can check out the rest of it here: https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity