Animals and plants are dying off at the fastest rate since the extinction of the dinosaur 66 million years ago - by 2040, more than five hundred species of terrestrial vertebrates are expected to disappear. Such a disappointing conclusion was reached by an international team of researchers who studied the impact of human activity on the biodiversity of the environment.
The environmentalists analyzed how the number of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians has changed in the past 120 years. Scientists excluded those animals with population of fewer than a thousand individuals.
Their calculations showed that in past epochs, for every ten thousand species of animals existing at that time, approximately two species of mammals disappeared. However, in the last two centuries after the onset of the Anthropocene, the century of mankind, this figure has grown by about 114 times. According to the most restrained estimates, the rate of extinction of animals is now approaching the rate at which representatives of the flora and fauna disappeared 66 million years ago, when dinosaurs, marine reptiles and pterosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earth.
515 species, 1.7% of the total species diversity of the Earth, were hit. The researchers note that another 388 species of animals are a step away from extinction: there are from a thousand to five thousand individuals left on Earth.
«When humanity exterminates populations and species of other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system,' said Ehrlich from Stanford University in California.
'The conservation of endangered species should be elevated to a national and global emergency for governments and institutions, equal to climate disruption to which it is linked,» he added.
The report is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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