SPECIES-CEASED: Humanity is on track to cause one million species to go extinct
While climate change is one of the biggest man-made environmental problems contributing to the dangerous loss of wildlife, there are others. These include loss of habitat as humans encroach on spaces previously reserved to wildlife and the introduction of invasive alien species.
MATTHEW ROZSA: According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Science – Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a United Nations body, one million animal and plant species face extinction — and their problem is, ultimately, going to be humanity’s problem… because “the sustainability of the use of wild species in the future is likely to be challenged by climate change, increasing demand and technological advances”…
While climate change is without question one of the biggest man-made environmental problems contributing to the dangerous loss of wildlife, Dr. Marla R. Emery, co-chair of the IPBES Sustainable Use of Wild Species Assessment and a scientific advisor for the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, explained that there are other human-made affecting the natural world. These include loss of habitat as humans encroach on spaces previously reserved to wildlife and the introduction of invasive alien species.
“The sustainability of uses of wild species is context specific,” Emery said. Life on Earth is threatened in multiple ways, including fishing, gathering, hunting, harvesting, “economic demands,” and sometimes even by “the systems that are in place to regulate and govern their activities” — or the lack thereof…
In an interview with Salon, Emery went into considerable detail about specific species threatened by extinction. All of the existing species of pangolins and echidnas are threatened; the former are slaughtered for their scales (used in traditional Chinese medicine) and their meat, while the latter have been hunted for their fur and faced peril due to habitat loss. Then there are a variety of species of sharks, which are either slaughtered for their fins (which are eaten) or killed simply because they were bycatch; rays also get accidentally caught by fishermen but kept for their meat.SOURCE…
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