FRANCE: Scientists have pointed fingers at humans for rates of extinction that are 100 times higher than would be normal without human intervention.
The world is witnessing extinction rates unseen in the last 65-million years. That was when dinosaurs died off – thanks to a mixture of an asteroid impact on Mexico and massive volcanic outbursts elsewhere. The four mass extinctions before that were also caused by natural disasters.
But this time it is down to human activity, say a group of scientists writing in the journal Science Advances.
Looking at data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the researchers looked at the rate of extinction of animals over the last 500 years. The union runs a Red List of critically endangered animals.
They found that normally two species per 10 000 species go extinct every 100 years. That is the baseline, or natural rate of extinction without disaster events.
Human intervention – they said in the release on Friday – has accelerated this rate by up to a hundred times. This has been during “the period during which Homo sapiens truly became a major force on the biosphere”.
However, the number of up to a 100% increase in extinctions is conservative. The researchers said it would be hard to accurately predict extinction rates when numbers had only been effectively recorded in recent years. And even these numbers only scratch the surface.
Their paper – “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction.” – said only around 16 000 of the estimated 1.4-million invertebrates worldwide were catalogued.
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