A new study warns that planet Earth is facing a mass extinction by the year 2100 that could wipe out more than a quarter of the world’s biodiversity.
The analysis, published on the specialized site Progress of science, is known when the 2022 United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP15) is held in Montreal, Canada.
In this research, Australian and European scientists developed a ‘virtual Earth’ to better map global extinctions caused by climate change. Based on the results, They forecast the loss of 10 percent of all plant and animal species by 2050, rising to 27 percent for fines this century.
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The study was led by European Commission Scientist Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey Bradshaw, from Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.
The planet, in its sixth extinction event: the threat to species
Academics say the planet has already entered its sixth mass extinction event, driven by human activity and climate change.
Scientists blame overexploitation of resources, land use change, pollution, climate change, and “biological invasions.”
According to the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 42,100 species are threatened with extinction.
“Children newborn today who live to be 70 years old can expect to witness the demise of literally thousands of species of plants and animals, from tiny orchids and the smallest insects to iconic animals such as the elephant and koala,” said Professor Bradshaw. , consigned Online mail.
Using technology, scientists created a model of the world with more than 15,000 “food webs” to predict the fate of interconnected species.
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In this regard, they point out that this tool “can map extinctions in all parts of the Earth” and predicts a bleak future for global diversity, confirming that the world is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction event.
Co-extinctions: what they are and how they affect the loss of biodiversity
Coextinctions refer to species that become extinct others –on which they depend– because they disappear due to climate change or changes in their habitat. “Think of a predatory species losing its prey to climate change,” Bradshaw graphed.
“The loss of the prey species is a primary extinction because it succumbed directly to a disturbance, but with nothing to eat, its predator will also go extinct,” he added.
He also gave examples, for example, of a parasite that loses its host due to deforestation, or a flowering plant that loses its pollinators because it gets too hot. “Each species depends on another in some way”, said.
Coextinction, they say, is now recognized as a major contributor to global biodiversity loss, strongly amplifying the effect of primary factors such as climate change. That is why the study showed the species linked by “who is coming to whom”.
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For his part, the scientist Strona explained about the model: “Essentially, we have populated a virtual world from scratch and mapped the resulting fate of thousands of species around the world to determine the probability of tipping points in the real world,” he said. .
“Then, we can assess adaptation to different climate scenarios and interrelate them with other factors to predict a pattern of coextinctions,” he added.
“The darkest moment for natural communities could be imminent and the next decades will be decisive for the future of global biodiversity”, the scientists analyzed.
GA /ds
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