Human activity has accelerated extinctions far beyond natural processes.
Should it raise alarm that each species that is lost destabilizes its ecosystem, and that uncounted thousands of ecosystems are increasingly endangered (including ecosystems that support our food production)?
It’s a big complex world and we discover species new to science all the time.
"Scientists were startled in 1980 by the discovery of a tremendous diversity of insects in tropical forests. In one study of just 19 trees in Panama, 80% of the 1,200 beetle species discovered were previously unknown to science... Surprisingly, scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how many species there are on Earth." - World Resources Institute (WRI).
So, if we don’t know how much there is to begin with, we don’t know exactly how much we’re losing.
If there are 100,000,000 different species on Earth,
and the extinction rate is just 0.01% per year,
then at least 10,000 species go extinct every year.
But we do have lots of facts and figures that seem to indicate that the news isn’t good.
Just to illustrate the degree of biodiversity loss we're facing, let’s take you through one scientific analysis...
•The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.*
•These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year.
•If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** - then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true - that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet - then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year.
*Experts actually call this natural extinction rate the background extinction rate. This simply means the rate of species extinctions that would occur if we humans were not around.
** Between 1.4 and 1.8 million species have already been scientifically identified.
Unlike the mass extinction events of geological history, the current extinction challenge is one for which a single species - ours - appears to be almost wholly responsible.
This is often referred to as the 6th extinction crisis, after the 5 known extinction waves in geological history.
So without arguing about who’s right or wrong.
Or what the exact numbers are.
There can be little debate that there is, in fact, a very serious biodiversity crisis."
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Australia is widely accepted by zoologists as having the world's worst record for extinctions of animals since European colonisation. This includes 24 birds, 7 frogs, and 27 marsupial mammals.
It doesn't include the extinctions of insects which are interspecies dependent on particular plants. The loss of insects is leading to the loss of flora and hence whole ecosystems coming under threat.
Australia’s biodiversity is currently in decline; in Australia, more than 1,700 species and ecological communities are known to be threatened and at risk of extinction.
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If this is the snapshot for Australia, what does that say for the Amazon and Indonesia where rainforests are being felled by the hundreds of square kilometres per week?
What does it say for Africa or India where human habitats encroach upon the wild?
Lady Ondine 