The report confirms something we all know deep down – that at an ever-accelerating rate we are hunting, fishing, chopping down, burning, farming, mining, paving and polluting the life out of our planet .

With a headline shouting, “one million species are threatened with extinction” the IPBES report is guaranteed to take you through seven stages of hopelessness before lunchtime.

And there’s something about the timing and content of this report that feels like we’ve gone from the era of “What can I do?” into the zone of “Shit, we really need to do something now!”

Wondering where to begin I check out my family’s ecological footprint on the Global Footprint Network website.

I think we’re pretty aware of our life choices but according to the calculator if everybody lived like us we’d be consuming the resources of two Earths.

We deeply love cheese, yoghurt, milk, meat, coffee, dark chocolate, red wine and the occasional box of those thin ginger biscuits from Sweden.

We enjoy the freedom of movement that comes with owning a car.

And with our extended families a three hour flight away in opposite directions we are regular flyers.

The report says, a transformative change; a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors can still conserve and restore nature.

I work for an environmental organisation and should have an idea what such a “transformative change” looks like, but the deeper I get into the report the less clearly I can see what that is.

And perhaps I’m not ready to see, not ready to peer ahead at what we will actually have to do, give up and embrace for this change to happen, but I know we better start working it out…and soon.