2023-04-27 11:57:25
According to the latest IPBES report, there are half a million “dead species walking”, species that still exist but are doomed to disappear in a few decades due to the degradation or destruction of their habitats
One million living species – out of the eight million we know – are now at risk of extinction. A
lmeno 500mila before the end of the century. A clear alarm was launched by Ipbes – the Intergovernmental Platform for Scientific Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, founded in 2012 -, according to which there are well-founded certainties that half of the species living today will disappear within this century. On the other hand, from the beginning of the 16th century onwards, at least 680 vertebrates, from the dodo to the Sicilian wolf and the Tasmanian tiger, have almost always disappeared due to human causes. It is no coincidence that the authors of the study «Assessment Report on the Different Value and Valuation of Nature» (presented in Rome at a conference organized by Ispra in the Italian seat of the European Parliament) – 82 experts in social sciences, economics and humanities – coined the expression «dead species walking» for the approximately 500,000 species not yet extinct, but which, due to the destruction of the habitats available to them and other factors linked to human activities (over-exploitation, pollution, climate change and the spread of invasive alien species) see reduce their chances of long-term survival.
Specifically, 25% of animal and plant species are threatened with extinction; over 40% of amphibian species; nearly 33% of reef-forming corals and marine mammals. For insects, available data suggest that at least 10% of species are threatened. Furthermore, in the last hundred years the average abundance of native species, in most terrestrial habitats, has decreased by at least 20%. Also according to Ipbes, the biomass of wild mammals has decreased by 82%.
The scenarios developed, based on the data available today, indicate that current rates of species extinctions in the wild are one hundred to one thousand times higher than the average extinction rate in the history of the planet. These numbers lead us to refer to the time we are living as sixth mass extinctionafter the previous ones caused by cosmic and planetary events, among which everyone knows the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.
April 26, 2023 (change April 26, 2023 | 12:11 am)
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