Expanding Agriculture and Climate Change are Placing the World’s Endemic Species at Risk

One of the world’s lead­ing con­ser­va­tion groups has warned that 38,744 species on its ​“sur­vival watch­list” have become at high risk of extinc­tion.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said at a con­fer­ence ear­lier this month in Marseilles, France that despite some improve­ments in con­ser­va­tion efforts over recent years, the num­ber of species at risk of extinc­tion con­tin­ues to grow.

The group has iden­ti­fied 138,374 species on its ​“sur­vival watch­list,” of which 28 per­cent have moved from being under threat of extinc­tion to high risk of extinc­tion.

Climate change and the degra­da­tion of nat­ural envi­ron­ments are two main rea­sons for the grow­ing threat to Earth’s bio­di­ver­sity.

Of par­tic­u­lar note, the IUCN warned that the komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, has moved into the high risk of extinc­tion cat­e­gory.

“The idea that these pre­his­toric ani­mals have moved one step closer to extinc­tion due in part to cli­mate change is ter­ri­fy­ing – and a fur­ther clar­ion call for nature to be placed at the heart of all deci­sion mak­ing on the eve of the COP26 in Glasgow,” Andrew Terry, a con­ser­va­tion direc­tor at the Zoological Society of London, told CNN.

The IUCN’s find­ings sup­port the con­clu­sions reached by a pre­vi­ous study pub­lished in the Nature Communications jour­nal, which showed that defor­esta­tion and cli­mate change are caus­ing rapid destruc­tion of nat­ural habi­tats around the world and putting vul­ner­a­ble species at risk.

The study found that the global demand for food has led to increased land use, which has, in turn, increased defor­esta­tion and the trans­for­ma­tion of nat­ural habi­tats into cul­ti­vated lands.

This trans­for­ma­tion both increases green­house emis­sions and harms the nat­ural cycles of ecosys­tems, neg­a­tively impact­ing all stages of ani­mal life.

“Whether these past trends in habi­tat range losses will reverse, con­tinue or accel­er­ate will depend on future global car­bon emis­sions and soci­etal choices in the com­ing years and decades,” said Andrea Manica, the lead author of the study and zool­ogy pro­fes­sor at the University of Cambridge.

In another study, recently pub­lished in the Biological Conversation jour­nal, sci­en­tists demon­strated that changes in the planet’s tem­per­a­ture by more than 3 ºC could cause the extinc­tion of half of endemic marine species and one-third of endemic species on land.

The syn­the­sis study found that ani­mals and plants liv­ing in one area are more likely to be affected by cli­mate change com­pared to less spe­cial­ized species.

However, inva­sive species are likely to face insignif­i­cant or no effects in the face of a warm­ing cli­mate. This might give inva­sive oppor­tunists room to grad­u­ally push out endemic species lead­ing to a decrease in bio­di­ver­sity.

“We were really sur­prised at how much more we expect to lose with such lit­tle increases in aver­age tem­per­a­ture,” one of the study’s authors told Carbon Brief. ​“Following the Paris Agreement [warm­ing lim­its] would make a huge dif­fer­ence for our bio­di­ver­sity world­wide.”

• CNN
• World Economic Forum
• Carbon Brief