Extinction risks faced by nearly half Earth’s species, says new study

Earth is closer to another mass extinction than previously thought, according to a bombshell study.

Nearly half of the planet’s animals are facing sharp population declines, nearly twice as many as previous estimates, scientists warn.

Evolutionary biologist Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, the lead author of the new study, told Dailymail.com that he found the results of his own study “very alarming.”

The team looked at more than 700,000 species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects, to understand which populations are at risk of disappearing from our planet and which have a chance of survival.

Pincheira-Donoso said the study found that 48 percent of species are in decline. Their biggest shock? As many as 33 percent of species previously considered “non-threatened” are undergoing serious declines.

A large number of creatures previously labeled as “non-threatened” (top right) or “near threatened” (bottom pie chart) have been found to suffer from population decline

Milky way frog from India (Melanobatrachus indicus) has been endangered by extensive agriculture in its habitat in the southern Western Ghats. The IUCN Red List currently lists this frog as endangered

By comparison, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has categorized only about 28 percent of known species as currently threatened with extinction.

Pincheira-Donoso, head of the MacroBiodiversity Lab at Queen’s University Belfast, and his team have taken traditional assessments of extinction risk from the IUCN and compared those numbers to broader data on declining populations of known species as trends over time.

While IUCN estimates showed less than what was found in the new report, the methodology used by Pincheira-Donoso and colleagues was also adopted by IUCN as a measure of extinction risk.

And their data also came from species population trends collected by the IUCN and its international governmental and civil conservation group partners for 2022.

Mammals, birds and insects were the groups that faced surprising declines, according to the new analysis.

Amphibians, long known to be particularly vulnerable to the global spread of industrial chemicals, disease and fungi, generally incurred some of the most dire risks.

The news was surprisingly better for both fish and reptiles, with more species in these groups appearing to have stable population numbers.

Alarmingly, few species seemed to really benefit from the twin drivers of human population growth and climate change, with only a very small number of species doing well.

“Just under three percent of them see their population increase,” Pincheira-Donoso said. “Not surprising, but still alarming.”

There are only 125 of the nocturnal and flying Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) or “Owl Parrots” left behind in New Zealand, according to the IUCN. But those numbers are actually an improvement resulting from dedicated local conservation efforts

The study found that the global distribution of animals with declining populations was most concentrated in the tropics. The researchers mapped the ‘declining’, ‘stable’ and ‘increasing’ populations by group: mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects

The hardest-hit species tended to live in the tropics, according to the study, with climate change a major driver.

“Animals in the tropics are more sensitive to rapid changes in their environmental temperature,” Pincheira-Donoso said CNN.

Oddly enough, birds in the tropics turned out to fare better than birds elsewhere, a finding he attributes to their ability to migrate, literally flying away from their problems.

While outside experts praised the study for “scrupulously combining population trajectories,” the authors were quick to acknowledge the gaps in the available information.

Unknown and under-recorded species populations were estimated using a Data Deficient (DD) calculation based on worst-case and best-case scenario averages.

The tropical regions were also unique here.

“Tropical regions tend to have higher numbers of species for which there is no information on population trends,” Pincheira-Donoso told Dailymail.com, “compared to numbers in temperate regions.”

“Tropical areas typically have an exceptional number of species,” he noted.