Earth's species feel the squeeze
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News science reporter
"Unprecedented" effort is required to slow biodiversity loss.
If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished.
That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date.
Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record.
Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk.
It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say.
The message is written large in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report.
It is the latest in a series of detailed documents to come out of the MA, a remarkable tome drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years.
The MA pulls together the current state of knowledge and in its latest release this week focuses specifically on biodiversity and the likely impacts its continued loss will have on human society.
Even faster
In one sense, and precisely because it is a synthesis, the new document contains few surprises. It is, nonetheless, a startling - and depressing - read.
A third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. It is thought 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans have gone since the beginning of industrial trawling.
And these are just the vertebrates - the species we know most about. Ninety percent of species, maybe more, have not even been catalogued by science yet.
"Changes in biodiversity were more rapid in the last 50 years than at any time in human history," said Dr Georgina Mace, the director of science at the Institute of Zoology, in London, UK, and an MA synthesis team member.
"And when you look to the future, to various projections and scenarios, we expect those changes to continue and in some circumstances to accelerate.
"Future models are very uncertain but all of them tell us that as we move into the next 100 years, we'll be seeing extinction rates that are a thousand to 10,000 times those in the fossil record."
'Invisible services'
One feature that sets the MA apart from previous projects of its kind is the way it defines ecosystems in terms of the "services", or benefits, that people get from them.
Some of these services are obvious - they are "provisional": timber for building; fish for food; fibres to make clothes.
At another level, these services are largely unseen - the recycling of nutrients, pollination and seed dispersal, climate control, the purification of water and air - but without these "support" and "regulating" systems, life on Earth would soon collapse.
Full story Signs Of The Times
BBC News science reporter
"Unprecedented" effort is required to slow biodiversity loss.
If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished.
That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date.
Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record.
Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk.
It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say.
The message is written large in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report.
It is the latest in a series of detailed documents to come out of the MA, a remarkable tome drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years.
The MA pulls together the current state of knowledge and in its latest release this week focuses specifically on biodiversity and the likely impacts its continued loss will have on human society.
Even faster
In one sense, and precisely because it is a synthesis, the new document contains few surprises. It is, nonetheless, a startling - and depressing - read.
A third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. It is thought 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans have gone since the beginning of industrial trawling.
And these are just the vertebrates - the species we know most about. Ninety percent of species, maybe more, have not even been catalogued by science yet.
"Changes in biodiversity were more rapid in the last 50 years than at any time in human history," said Dr Georgina Mace, the director of science at the Institute of Zoology, in London, UK, and an MA synthesis team member.
"And when you look to the future, to various projections and scenarios, we expect those changes to continue and in some circumstances to accelerate.
"Future models are very uncertain but all of them tell us that as we move into the next 100 years, we'll be seeing extinction rates that are a thousand to 10,000 times those in the fossil record."
'Invisible services'
One feature that sets the MA apart from previous projects of its kind is the way it defines ecosystems in terms of the "services", or benefits, that people get from them.
Some of these services are obvious - they are "provisional": timber for building; fish for food; fibres to make clothes.
At another level, these services are largely unseen - the recycling of nutrients, pollination and seed dispersal, climate control, the purification of water and air - but without these "support" and "regulating" systems, life on Earth would soon collapse.
Full story Signs Of The Times
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