Nick Whigham, NEWS.COM.AU
As humans continue to swallow up the globe, we do so at the expense of the planet’s biodiversity as animal populations continue to decline at an alarming rate.
That is the stark message at the core of a recent report released by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) called the Living Planet Report 2016. The sobering study reaffirms the fact we’re in the middle of a human-produced mass extinction event that is seeing populations of animal species evaporate in front of our eyes.
From 1970 to 2012 populations of vertebrate animals have decreased in abundance by 58 per cent. As the trend continues, researchers expect about two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals to have disappeared from the 50 years between 1970 and 2020.
The WWF points to habitat loss and habitat degradation as a key factor in Earth’s declining biodiversity, along with climate change, unsustainable practices in things like the global food supply and an overuse of the Earth’s natural resources which exceeds the planet’s biocapacity.
Read more at http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/the-mass-extinction-event-going-unnoticed-as-the-planets-biodiversity-dwindles/news-story/63c0ba483308cb4d73ef8d0a230459ab
From 1970 to 2012 populations of vertebrate animals have decreased in abundance by 58 per cent. As the trend continues, researchers expect about two-thirds of all of these individual birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals to have disappeared from the 50 years between 1970 and 2020.
The WWF points to habitat loss and habitat degradation as a key factor in Earth’s declining biodiversity, along with climate change, unsustainable practices in things like the global food supply and an overuse of the Earth’s natural resources which exceeds the planet’s biocapacity.
Read more at http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/the-mass-extinction-event-going-unnoticed-as-the-planets-biodiversity-dwindles/news-story/63c0ba483308cb4d73ef8d0a230459ab