Conservation Union Finds 16,300 Species Threatened
Date: 13-Sep-07
Country: US
Author: Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
In what is billed as the world's most authoritative
assessment of Earth's plants and animals, the global group
considered 41,415 species and found that of those, 16,306 were
under threat, said Craig Hilton-Tailor, the list's manager.
That is nearly 200 more species of wildlife than last year,
Hilton-Tailor said in a telephone interview, adding that this
estimate is "just the tip of the iceberg."
"It's a very bad news story," Jane Smart, head of the
conservation group's species program, said at a briefing. "Our
lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately
its protection is essential for our very survival."
Extinction rates are now about 100 to 1,000 times higher
than normal, and climate change is already affecting
biodiversity, endangered species experts at the briefing said.
The World Conservation Union -- a global group whose
members includes nations, government agencies, nongovernmental
organizations and thousands of scientists -- aims to
"influence, encourage and assist societies" to conserve nature
and natural resources.
While it does not play a major role in US decisions on
wildlife conservation because the United States does this
through its own Endangered Species Act, the conservation union
is highly influential in other regions, particularly in
developing countries which cannot afford to make their own
assessments of which species are in trouble.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FACTOR
Three of the new species added to this year's list are
corals in the Galapagos, which are critically endangered by the
warm-water Pacific Ocean pattern El Nino and by climate change,
the group said in a statement.
Hilton-Tailor said global warming is a factor in these and
other species' endangerment, but not the only factor.
The Red List is aimed at policy makers and ordinary people,
Hilton-Tailor said.
"If everybody on the planet cooperated and adopted a
sustainable way of living, a lot of these problems would go
away," he said. He acknowledged that such cooperation has not
occurred in the course of human history.
Asked to name a particularly troubling example,
Hilton-Tailor mentioned the western lowland gorilla, which
moves from endangered to critically endangered on the latest
list. Its decline is due to the Ebola virus and commercial
hunting of so-called bush meat.
This case points up the need for better viral controls, and
for an alternative source of food for people in the gorilla's
range, from Angola to Congo to Gabon.
Development is the culprit in the decline of the Yangtze
River dolphin, also known as the baiji, Hilton-Tailor said. It
is critically endangered and possibly extinct, with perhaps one
or two individual creatures remaining.
Changes in river flows due to dams, pollution, over-fishing
and the use of electric shocks to fish in the Yangtze system
are all factors in the cetacean's disappearance. Heavy river
traffic in fast-developing China is another cause.
"Any poor dolphin would really have to do amazing
acrobatics to avoid being hit by one of those ships,"
Hilton-Tailor said.
On the plus side, reptiles in North America are holding
their own, with only 12 percent of snakes and lizards listed as
threatened.
