HONG KONG: The CSIRO is warning 99 per cent of the world’s seabirds species will be ingesting plastic by 2050 if current marine pollution trends continue.
A study by researchers from the CSIRO and Imperial College London found the percentage of birds consuming plastic in marine environments was increasing at an alarming rate.
The study’s lead author, Doctor Chris Wilcox, said evidence suggested almost 80 per cent of seabird species were ingesting plastic, and 90 per cent of birds in those species had plastics in their gut.
“It’s gone up from about 20 per cent [of birds] or less in the early 60s,” he said.
“From the analysis we did, there’s no clear reason to expect that trend will change and we estimate that by 2050 you could say that all of seabirds species will be affected by plastic ingestion.
“I think I and my co-authors were rather shocked when we started to get the numbers back.”
Dr Wilcox and his colleagues created a map of plastic debris in marine environments and looked at where seabirds were found.
They then compared those maps with the data of nearly 100 studies published since the 1960s which detailed the rate of plastic ingestion by certain bird species.
The highest risk areas are along the southern edges of Australia, South Africa and South America, where larger bird populations encounter significant amounts of debris.
But globally the most dangerous location for seabirds is in the south Tasman Sea.
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