CNN

October 4, 2022
Australia, which has one of the world’s worst records on extinctions, on Tuesday announced a 10-year plan to prevent any more species from dying out in the country by protecting its most threatened plants and animals.

Launching the plan at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia’s Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek said the Labor government had a “very ambitious target” to conserve more than 30% of Australia’s land mass by 2030.

“We’re talking about an extra 50 million hectares (about 124,000 acres) of landscape that we need to find and to manage in a way that protects the landscape and the species that depend on it,” Plibersek said.

The plan brings Australia into line with more than 100 other countries, including the United States, which have pledged to protect 30% of their land and 30% of their ocean by 2030. The initial coalition of countries announced their commitment ahead of the One Planet summit in 2021.

Read More

IUCN

March 14, 2022
The new UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report1 synthesizes the latest science on the impacts on and vulnerability of natural and socio-economic systems to climate change, and challenges and options for adaptation.

A key message from the IPCC report is that “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” All approaches are needed, including “safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems” and protecting “approximately 30% to 50% of the Earth’s land, freshwater and ocean areas, including near-natural ecosystems.”

Human-induced climate change and extreme weather events have substantially damaged ecosystems, and led to increases in the risk of extinction of more than 10,000 species, including the extinct Bramble Cay melomys. Such events simultaneously result in serious implications for human well-being by impacting on food and water security , and higher incidence of associated diseases.

Read More

Scientific American - OpEd

November 30, 2021
November 30 is the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, an informal holiday established in 2011 by a U.K.-based coalition of artists, scientists and activists. The point of the day is political: to draw public attention to human-caused extinctions, in hopes of preventing more. But for many participants the day is also personal, an attempt to grasp the enormity of extinction.

Every year brings more species to memorialize, and this year is no exception. Among this year’s newcomers are 23 species of plants and animals that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared extinct at the end of September. Had you heard of the turgid-blossom pearly mussel, the flat pigtoe mussel or the stirrupshell mussel? What about the Scioto madtom or the San Marcos gambusia, two freshwater fish? Me neither. These species, like so many others, went extinct before most of us even knew their names. 

We need a Remembrance Day for Lost Species. But if we want to protect life on a meaningful scale, we also need to remember the species we still have.

Read More

The New York Times [Opinion]

September 30, 2021
Twin crises afflict the natural world. The first is climate change. Its causes and potentially catastrophic consequences are well known. The second crisis has received much less attention and is less understood but still requires urgent attention by global policymakers. It is the collapse of biodiversity, the sum of all things living on the planet.

As species disappear and the complex relationships between living things and systems become frayed and broken, the growing damage to the world’s biodiversity presents dire risks to human societies.

The extinction of plants and animals is accelerating, moving an estimated 1,000 times faster than natural rates before humans emerged. Bugs on our windshields are no longer a summer thing as insect populations plummet. Nearly three billion birds have been lost in North America since 1970, diminishing the pollination of food crops. In India, thousands of people are dying of rabies because the population of vultures that feed on garbage is cratering, resulting in a huge increase in feral dogs that eat these food scraps in the birds’ absence.

This past week, federal wildlife officials, as if underscoring the point, recommended that 22 animals and one plant be declared extinct. They include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish and a bat.

Read More

The Nature Conservancy

August 10, 2021
We are living through a make-or-break chapter in the story of life on Earth. In the last 50 years alone, vertebrate populations have declined by 68 percent. Today, a full third of freshwater and marine species face extinction, while countless invertebrates could disappear before we realize their full importance to their ecosystems.

Humanity occupies a unique position in this climax. Our actions this decade could either restore the ecological balance or tip it, causing species that rely upon one another within ecosystems to fall like dominoes—with devastating outcomes for human well-being. However overwhelming it sounds, there is good news hidden in these facts: We can still change how this story unfolds.

We still have a chance to save species—and ourselves—if we act now.

Read More

The New York Times

August 9, 2021
Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.

Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.

Read More

Reuters

July 14, 2021
More than 10,000 species of plants and animals are at high risk of extinction due to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest - 35% of which has already been deforested or degraded, according to the draft of a landmark scientific report published on Wednesday.

Produced by the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the 33-chapter report brings together research on the world's largest rainforest from 200 scientists from across the globe. It is the most detailed assessment of the state of the forest to date and both makes clear the vital role the Amazon plays in global climate and the profound risks it is facing.

Read More

EcoWatch

May 24, 2021
The natural world is in a state of crisis, and we are to blame. We are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, the biggest loss of species in the history of humankind. So many species are facing total annihilation. Nearly one-third of freshwater species are facing extinction. So are 40 percent of amphibians; 84 percent of large mammals; a third of reef-building corals; and nearly one-third of oak trees. Rhinos and elephants are being gunned down at rates so alarming that they could be completely wiped out from the wild by 2034. There may be fewer than 10 vaquita—a kind of porpoise endemic to Mexico's Gulf of California—due to illegal fishing nets, pesticides and irrigation. There are 130,000 plant species that could become extinct in our lifetimes. All told, about 28 percent of evaluated plant and animal species across the planet are now at risk of becoming extinct.

Read More

Phys.org

April 9, 2021
Unless nations dramatically improve on carbon cutting pledges made under the 2015 Paris climate treaty, the planet's richest concentrations of animal and plant life will be irreversibly ravaged by global warming, scientists warned Friday.

An analysis of 8,000 published risk assessments for species showed a high danger for extinction in nearly 300 biodiversity "hot spots", on land and in the sea, if temperatures rise three degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, they reported in the journal Biological Conservation.

Read More

Bloomberg Green

April 8, 2021
The lemurs of Madagascar and Himalayan snow leopards are among the hundreds of endemic species that will all but disappear if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked. 

The plants and animals that are unique to a single location such as one island or one country, are particularly vulnerable to climate change, according to research by a global team of scientists published in the Biological Conservation journal on Friday. They’re almost three times more likely to go extinct, according to an analysis of almost 300 biodiversity hotspots on land and sea. 

“Unfortunately, our study shows that those biodiversity rich-spots will not be able to act as a safe haven from climate change,” said Mariana Vale, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a co-author of the study. “This could greatly increase extinction rates worldwide.”

Read More

Frontiers in Conservation Science

January 13, 2021
We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

Read More

Eurasian Review

January 11, 2021
Biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing challenges humanity faces today. All the recently published reports on biodiversity – the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, the Living Planet Report, the Global Forest Resources Assessment Report and the Global Biodiversity Outlook – toll alarm bells pointing out the failure of global commitments in terms of biodiversity conservation.

According to the Living Planet Index (LPI) 2020, decline was captured for the 68% of the monitored population (i.e. 20,811 populations of 4,392 species) for the period of 1970-2016. 

The LPI “is a measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species from terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats adopted by the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to track the progress”.

Read More

The Washington Post

December 2, 2020
This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U.N. State of the Climate report published Wednesday.

To mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris accord, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres summarized the findings in unusually stark terms.

“To put it simply,” he said in a speech at Columbia University, “the state of the planet is broken.”

Read More

The Guardian

December 2, 2020
Humanity is facing a new war, unprecedented in history, the secretary general of the UN has warned, which is in danger of destroying our future before we have fully understood the risk.

The stark message from António Guterres follows a year of global upheaval, with the coronavirus pandemic causing governments to shut down whole countries for months at a time, while wildfires, hurricanes and powerful storms have scarred the globe.

Guterres said: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help to solve it.”

Read More

BBC

September 30, 2020
Human activities are destroying the natural world, leading to the extinction of animal and plant species at an alarming rate. Now, world leaders are promising action to tackle the problem. But will it be enough?

Read More