Rated
Oct 04 2008
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4 reviews
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environment, sustainability, extinctions
• news.com.au
From the page: "The World Conservation Congress, held every four years, will also release an update on Monday of the famous Red List on biodiversity, deemed the global standard for conservation monitoring.
ā€oeThe evidence is overwhelming - and we have really good data now - that what we are seeing is probably a mass extinction,” the sixth in 450 million years, said Michael Hoffman, a mammal expert at IUCN who worked extensively on the Red List.
The current pace of dieoff is 100 to 1000 times higher than the so-called ā€oebackground rate” of extinction - the average rate, over millions of years, at which species bite the dust.
ā€oeSpecies extinctions across all these groups will have very far-reaching consequences on human beings,” he said.
The Red List will include the most comprehensive study ever made on the survival status of Earth's more than 5000 mammals species.
The new biodiversity ā€oebible” is the fruit of 1700 experts, and scientists who took part in the effort say it will make for grim reading.
The 2007 edition already shows more than a third of 41,000 species surveyed are facing extinction: a quarter of all mammals, one out of eight birds, one out of three amphibians, and 70 percent of plants."