By Helen
Briggs, Becky Dale and Nassos Stylianou BBC News
5 May 2019
The felling
of forests, the plundering of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and
water are together pushing the natural world to the brink.
That's the
warning more than 500 experts in 50 countries are expected to give in a major
UN-backed report,
due to be published on Monday.
The
assessment will highlight the
losses that have hit the natural world over the past 50 years and how
the future is looking bleak for tens to hundreds of thousands of species.
The
document, from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), is also
expected to set out an urgent rescue plan for nature.
So what do
we know about the health of the planet in terms of biodiversity (the variety of
living things on Earth and the ecosystems they belong to)?
1. The
world's biodiversity is vanishing fast
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is
a critical measure of our impact on nature.
Almost
100,000 species have been assessed so far for this inventory of endangered
species. Of these, more than a quarter are threatened with extinction, ranging
from Madagascar's lemurs to amphibians like frogs and salamanders, and plants
such as conifers and orchids.
The
assessments aren't yet complete, and we don't even know exactly how many
animals, fungi and plants are on the planet. Estimates range from about two
million species to approximately one trillion, but most experts go for
around 11
million species or fewer.
Scientists believe
the Earth is being driven towards a "mass extinction event" - only
the sixth in the last half-billion years.
"There
is now overwhelming evidence that we are losing the planet's species at an
alarming speed," Prof Alexandre Antonelli, the director of science at the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told BBC News.
The last
time we had a similar situation was about 66 million years ago, which was
caused by an asteroid hitting Earth, he said, though this time, "humans
are the ones to blame".
Current
extinction rates are about 1,000 times higher than before humans came along,
and future rates are likely to about 10,000 times higher,
according to estimates.
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