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TechnoratiThreatened Species Red List Shows Escalating 'Global Extinction Crisis'
Corals and seaweed have joined the ranks of threatened species, and more apes and reptiles are now facing extinction according to the World Conservation Union, which warns of a "global extinction crisis".
The conservation group's annual Red List of threatened species, published today, found that the extinction crisis had escalated in the last year with 16,306 species now at the highest levels of extinction threat, equivalent to almost 40% of all species in the survey.
A quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and one in eight birds on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.
More than 180 species have been added since 2006 to the ranks of those classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable.
IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre warned that this year's list showed how efforts to protect species were inadequate and that a concerted effort by all levels of society was needed to prevent their widespread extinction.
"The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing and we need to act now to significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis," she said.
Despite reports of its demise, the Yangtze river dolphin is classified as critically endangered (possibly extinct). Although the last documented sighting of the dolphin was in 2002, further surveys are needed before it can be definitively classified as extinct, said the IUCN. A possible sighting last month is being investigated by Chinese scientists.
The IUCN report had just one success story. Mauritius Echo Parakeets have been downlisted from the "critically endangered" category to "endangered" after conservation measures led to 139 birds bred in captivity being successfully released into the wild.
Deputy head of IUCN's species programme, Jean-Christophe Vié, said an improvement for only one species was "really worrying" in the light of government commitments such as the 2010 target to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss.
Corals were assessed and added to the Red List for the first time, and two corals found in the Galapagos have entered the list in the "critically endangered" category and one in the "vulnerable" category. The rise in sea temperature caused by the effects of El Niño and climate change are identified as the main threats.
Ocean warming also threatens seaweeds around the islands, with 10 classified as critically endangered, six of which are highlighted as "possibly extinct". The seaweeds are also affected by overfishing which removes predators from the food chain, resulting in an increase in sea urchins, which overgraze the algae.
Gorillas and orangutans face a particularly grim future after the discovery that more than 60% of Western Lowland Gorillas in Africa have been wiped out by the Ebola virus and the commercial bushmeat trade, and forest clearance for oil palm plantations, along with illegal logging, continue to seriously threaten the survival of orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo.
The Gharial crocodile has been uplisted from "endangered" to "critically endangered" following the discovery that there are less than 200 breeding adults left in the wild. The report said that excessive irreversible habitat loss in Nepal and India following the construction of dams and irrigation canals had wiped out more than half the crocodile's population in the last decade.
Other particularly threatened animals include the Eastern Chimpanzee, found in central and east Africa, which faces habitat loss, poaching and disease, and Speke's Gazelle whose numbers have been decimated by hunting, drought and overgrazing across the grasslands of Somalia and Ethiopia.
Two Mexican freshwater turtle species and a rattlesnake species are among the 700 reptiles added to the list this year after a major assessment in Mexico and North America. The Santa Catalina Island Rattlesnake, caught by illegal collectors and eaten by feral cats, is the most endangered new entry.
The brightly-coloured Banggai Cardinalfish, collected for the international aquarium trade, is one of 1,200 endangered fish on the list.
Vultures in Africa and Asia are among the most endangered birds with five species, including the Red-headed Vulture and the Egyptian Vulture, reclassified this year. Lack of food, due to habitat loss, a reduction in grazing mammals and the increasing use of drugs to treat livestock are to blame for the vultures' rapid decline.
The Red List examines just over 40,000 species, around 12% of the 15m species in the world.
Around 70% of the world's assessed plants are on the 2007 Red List. The Woolly-stalked Begonia, a Malaysian herb, was the only species declared extinct this year bringing the total number of extinct species to 785. A further 65 species now exist only in captivity.
Chair of the IUCN's species survival commission, Holly Dublin, said it showed how environmentalists alone could not save endangered animals and plants.
"The challenge of the extinction crisis also requires attention and action from the general public, the private sector, governments and policy makers to ensure that global biodiversity remains intact for generations to come," she said.
The IUCN report stressed how the rapid disappearance of species had a direct impact on people's lives. Declining freshwater fish, for example, deprived rural poor communities of their major source of food and their livelihoods.
Jane Smart, head of the IUCN's species programme, said: "Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival."
Conservation charity, WWF, said the increasing number of threatened species on the IUCN Red List demonstrated how the planet was being pushed to its limits.
"We're at code red," said Dr Mark Wright, chief scientist at WWF-UK. "The plight of the world's species is a mirror on the state of the planet. Species are under enormous pressure as we systematically destroy their habitat or overexploit them for our increasingly demanding lifestyles.
"We urgently need to reverse this trend and start living within the planet's natural resources - not just for the wellbeing of these threatened species but also for our own."
© 2007 The Guardian
16 Comments so far
Show AllHey there SikWilly - the fact that folks like yourself are 'exposing' a problem that has existed for a long time now tells a sad story itself.
Where are the solutions or is there no hope? Exposing the thing which is happening in front of you is rather odd to me. However if there are solutions that we can employ we are not discussing them honestly.
The required materials for solar power are limited. Nuclear and coal power are very dirty as is oil. Electric cars will get their power from primarily coal fired power plants if everyone had one. The reality is that our way of life with all of its gadetry needing power is only going to last a very limited time. Not only are the resources required to sustain this McMansion lifestyle going to run out soon, but the processes by which it is all manufactured generally poison the areas they occupy.
I could go on and on about the ills of our way of living and how we are drowning in our own filth. It would accomplish nothing though. Also you failed to recognize that almost all creation myths end in an apocalyptic tragedy. Few solutions being proffered are real.
Bong hit anyone?
We are in more trouble than we realize. Right now, without climate change as a factor, we are at 120% consumption, meaning we need 1.2 Earths to continue our current rate of consumption. Consumption rates are projected to increase to 200% by 2050. We are heading extremely quickly towards a natural resource catastrophe. This study does not take into account resources lost to global warming (droughts, floods, rising seas, etc.). Add that to the picture and it seems insurmountable. On top of all this, "we are at the opening stages of a human-caused biotic holocaust, a wholesale elimination of species..." E.O. Wilson, in a letter to congress, explained that he believes, just this extinction crisis alone threatens humanity's survival. We have rampant global warming, rampant resource consumption, and rampant species genocide, any one of which could spell the end to society as we know it.
This isn't doomsday talk. There is irrefutible evidence confirming all three scenerios.
I hate to put in a plug for my website, but www.oneplanetonelife.com is an awesome resource exposing these problems, especially species extinction.
I believe it is not all about changingr habits, its about changing our spirit. Once we do that, the rest falls in line. Respect for all life. With an extremely large portion of the world believing in a creator, how can we justify creations slaughter.
webwalk, You mistake my lifestyle from others, and that is why your cause is lost. All the those Indians and Chinese want the "great white way" and we can't deny them from it.
damon13,
Gosh Damon, do you see any problem with the current situation? Do you see any problem with our transportation system? Do you see any problem with our food production system? What fantasy-land do you live in?
The lovely truth is, our systems have destabilized the biosphere, and are accellerating this disruption, and we are all in DEEP DOO DOO ecologically, and we have to change our systems so they work in harmony with nature, not in disruption of nature. You are obviously free to make fun of anyone who points this out, but continuing to belch carbon into the atmosphere is not any answer to anything.
i understand that you do not want to change your life, and you do not want to struggle with hard choices, and there are structural impediments to reducing your carbon belching activities, but none of that changes the truth about our carbon belching activities.
You are also free to pretend that i said something about horses and habitrails, but of course i said no such thing.
webwalk, I'm sick to death of your ridiculous logic. Your nickel and dime environmentalism. Let's just say for argument, you ride in a horse and buggy everywhere. Well the vegan nazi's are going to tell you that your horses contribute methane into the environment. And it's actually true. So just walk. Fuck it. All americans just walk to work, that sounds like a good solution. We can all live in a huge "habit-trail" complex just like hamsters. Do you see the problem with this solution?
The situation is horrific. And it's true that if the human population continues to expand, global warming keeps accelerating at the same pace, pollution and poaching continue, etc., it will only get much worse. But you can't be serious, Vera Gottlieb. Are you suggesting that the decline of the western lowland gorilla and all of the world's threatened species can be blamed on the United States?
The finger pointing is starting to get boring.
It could be a step in the right direction if homo sapiens would stop looking at the monetary value of everything that surrounds him. I just created a decal that simply states...'Cherish or Perish' and has the American continent as background. A shocking statement but the truth non-the-less.
As one species expands (Homo Sapiens Sapiens, doubling population in one generation - 1965: 3.3 bn - 2005: 6.5 bn), other species are pressed to oblivion.
Nothing irregular about that.
Rather it's a natural law within the limited set of the Biosphere which we can't overturn (- at least there's one law Bush can't rescind).
So to limit extinction of other species the only way is to limit our own expansion. Like it or not. It amounts to impossible to both eating and keeping our "cake", i.e. our living-environment ("can't have your cake and eat it too").
Every child born expanding human population amounts to a deliberate collective human choice to decrease other species in the Biosphere. Unless someone works out how to expand the Earth's Biosphere (very unlikely), that's how it is and will be.
Choose.
Hi,
Instead of bumper stickers on our carbon-belching transport, we should stop using carbon-belching transport. How can we as individuals look to our governmental and corporate "leaders" to make hard changes, but we cannot ourselves make hard changes in our own lives?
When the destabilized biosphere crashes our economy and we all start dying, will we look back in our death throes and wish we had been a little harder on ourselves, as we watched the crisis approach?
I commend to you, "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. It considers what might happen to the earth if there were no longer humans - a route on which we seem to be well along
I'm not an overly religious person, but we are rapidly evicting ourselves from Eden. I like the bumper sticker "I brake for all God's creatures".
"When apes share close to 100% of our DNA shouldn't killing them be the crime of murder?"
Ezeflyer: my answer would be yes! If great apes like gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans become extinct, we will lose part of ourselves.
Sorry to post this to those CD readers who have read it but I have posting about "Catastrophic Bio-Diversity Reductions" for months to DODO deniers.....
Climate change beyond our control
Jun 03, 2007 04:30 AM
Rudyard Griffiths
The basic problem I have with the Kyoto Protocol – and much of the environmental advocacy set to take place when the G8 nations meet in Germany next week – is its promulgation of an illusion of control when it comes to addressing the long-term effects of climate change.
By negotiating country-by-country emission reductions first for 2012 and then even tougher targets for 2020 and beyond, the perception fostered by the Kyoto Protocol is that the international community can ensure that global warming becomes a manageable disease as opposed to a truly life-threatening condition.
I would argue to the contrary that the balance of evidence suggests future climate change will be driven by forces largely beyond Canadians' control.
Take China and India for example. Both countries have repeatedly flagged to the international community that they will resist any post-2012 Kyoto agreement to address climate change that threatens their future economic development.
For these emerging economic juggernauts the argument is simple: why shouldn't developing economies follow a process of industrialization similar to what the West underwent and accrue, over time, the same social and economic benefits?
When one considers, however, that China has only just entered what economists characterize as its period of "light industrialization," with India not much further ahead, the extent of both countries' future impact on climate change quickly becomes apparent.
By the time the first round of the Kyoto Protocol wraps up in 2012, India and China will have constructed some 800 new coal-fired power plants plus potentially hundreds more the international community will never know about.
The resulting emissions in India and China from coal alone from 1990 to 2012 have been estimated at a staggering 2.5 billion tons of CO2. This compares to the best-case scenario under Kyoto for the same time period of 500 million tons of reductions in CO2 emissions if every country that has signed the treaty, including we laggards in Canada, meets its 2012 targets.
The harsh reality is that despite being the largest producers of greenhouse gases on a per-capita basis, developed countries will soon tumble down the list of largest overall carbon emitters as the developing world starts to industrialize in earnest. It has been estimated, for instance, that the seven largest emerging economies alone could more than triple the world's annual carbon emissions to 25 gigatons by 2050 if they fail in the Herculean task of reducing energy use by 1 per cent a year from now through to the mid-century.
These kinds of emission levels could push the world by 2050 into the danger zone of a 3- to 4-degree increase in global temperatures leading to the extinction of 20 per cent or more of the world's known species, massive disruptions in global trade and global economy, and the displacement of up to a billion people by rising sea levels and droughts.
The inconvenient truth about Kyoto is that it is not the all-encompassing solution to global warming we so desperately wish it was. Yes, reducing carbon emissions and greening our economy are both prudent and the right thing to do. But Canada also needs to start preparing now to address the massive economic and social consequences of rapid climate change within our borders.
This will require investing billions annually in everything from strengthening our transportation infrastructure to cooling our fast-warming cities to welcoming ever greater numbers of climate change refugees.
Next week in Potsdam, by all means let's renew Canada's commitment to "go green" but not at the cost of losing the economic levers we will need domestically in the decades ahead to weather the climate change storm brought on by the fast industrializing developing world.
Rudyard Griffiths is the co-founder of the Dominion Institute.
rudyard@dominion.ca
When apes share close to 100% of our DNA shouldn't killing them be the crime of murder?
Funding planned parenthood instead of the M/I/I complex is the humane way to control the world's overpopulation that is causing species extinctions. But how do we make money by selling contraceptives instead of bombs?
The treatment of wildlife by homosapiens is a disgrace, and that's an understatement. Particularly the way homosapiens treat their great ape and primate cousins just breaks my heart everyday. I support chimpanzee sanctuaries here in the US because I believe that a chimp should be a chimp and not be used for diabolical lab experiments or be exploited for entertainment. Primates are our relatives and they need our love not abuse.