Tiger-centric conservation pushing others to the brink?

Divya Gandhi
21 February 2009
The Hindu

Red List will more than double in 10 years, says Simon Stuart

Bangalore: While India’s protected areas are becoming the “last refuges” in South and Southeast Asia for threatened species, much of the country’s wildlife – for instance the spotted Malabar civet cat of the Western Ghats and the pigmy hog in Assam – could be teetering on the brink of extinction, cautions Simon Stuart, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission.

“In all our focus on the tiger, we might be neglecting several other species that need attention. For instance, the Barasingha deer and wild Asian water buffalo are now confined to isolated pockets in India,” said Dr. Stuart who is in the city to attend an international conference to mark 125 years of Bombay Natural History Society.

He said almost every species of primates – other than the rhesus macaque and common langur — is threatened.

“Globally, the current extinction rate may be 100 to 1,000 times the natural rate. I would call it an extinction crisis,” said Dr. Stuart.

“There have been 29 extinctions in just the last 24 years – including birds, amphibians and molluscs. We believe the Yangtze River Dolphin is possibly already extinct and the Sumatran Rhinoceros is in all likelihood extinct on the Asian mainland.”

The formidable Red List of threatened species could more than double in size in a decade as IUCN intensifies its research into the status of the planet’s wildlife, he said. Nearly 17,000 species of animals and plants feature on Red List as “threatened species,” a figure that could grow to exceed 40,000 when IUCN completed its target inventory in about 10 years, he said.

The Red List comprised a database of 45,000 species – including mammals, birds, amphibians, freshwater crabs, warm-water reef building corals, conifers and cycads – both threatened and non-threatened.

The single biggest reason for extinction was habitat loss, although pollution and disease play a smaller but significant part especially in the decline of amphibians, he said.

“More land has been converted to cropland in the last half century than in the 18th and 19th Century combined.”

However, the good news was that conservation worked, he said.