JULY 18,
2019
More than
28,000 species around the world are threatened, according to the Red List of Threatened Species compiled
by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The list,
updated on Thursday night, has assessed the extinction risk of almost 106,000 species
and found more than a quarter are in trouble.
While
recent headline-grabbing estimates put as many as 1 million species facing
extinction, these were based on approximations, whereas the IUCN uses rigorous
criteria to assess each species, creating the world-standard guide to
biodiversity extinction
risk.
In this
update, 105,732 species were ranked from least concern (little to no risk of
extinction), to critically endangered (an extremely high risk of extinction)
and extinct (the last individual of a species has expired).
This Red
List update doesn't hold a lot of good news. It takes the total number of
threatened species to 28,338 (or 27% of those assessed) and logs the extinction
of 873 species since the year 1500.
These
numbers seem small when thinking about the estimated 1 million species at risk
of extinction, but only around 1% of the world's animals, fungi and plants have
been formally assessed on the IUCN Red List. As more species are assessed, the
number of threatened species will no doubt grow.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!