Species-killing humans: we’ve destroyed nearly 70 percent of the vertebrate population since 1970

According to the environmental organization WWF, humanity has destroyed nearly 70 percent of all known vertebrate populations in the past few decades. The causes of this mass extinction of species are “all man-made,” according to the Living Planet Report, published by WWF in Berlin on Thursday.

Humanity is destroying its own livelihood “with the jackhammer” and further heating the “twin crisis” of species extinction and climate change.

WWF Germany Executive Director Christoph Heinrich emphasized that health, economy and the entire existence of humanity depend on nature. Nature is “like a tower in which each building block represents an animal or plant species”. “The more stones are knocked out of the tower, ie the more species that die out, the more unstable it becomes,” explains Heinrich.

The WWF has been publishing the Living Planet Report since 1998, which is published every two years. For the latest edition, experts from the environmental organization together with the London Zoological Society evaluated more than 31,000 stocks of more than 5,200 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles. Freshwater species are therefore most affected by the species crisis. Their population has declined by an average of 83 percent since 1970.

The report names South and Central America as the geographic hot spot for species extinction. The animal populations studied there declined by an average of 94 percent.

In addition to habitat destruction and environmental pollution, the climate crisis with effects such as increasing heat waves and ocean acidification is one of the main reasons for the species crisis, according to the report. On the other hand, a changed species composition also has an impact on the Earth’s climate, for example because dying forests could store less climate-damaging CO2. Species crisis and climate crisis are fatally linked, the WWF report warns.

The WWF cites the western lowland gorilla as an example of a particularly endangered species: between 2005 and 2019 alone, the population in Cameroon’s Nki National Park has declined by 69 percent. In Brazil, the number of dolphins in the Amazon decreased by 67 percent between 1994 and 2016. In Europe, the skylarks suffered mainly from environmental changes, with their population declining by 56 percent from 1980 to 2019.

The WWF cited the UN Biodiversity Conference as an opportunity to halt species extinction. A global agreement on the conservation of biological diversity is to be negotiated at the December meeting in Montreal, Canada.

According to the WWF, growing numbers of white-tailed eagles in northern Germany show that species extinctions can be halted. In 1945 there was only one pair of areas in Schleswig-Holstein, but in 2010 there were 57. Between 2013 and 2019 alone, the gray seal population in the Baltic Sea increased by 139 percent. In Nepal, the tiger population grew by 91 percent from 121 in 2009 to 235 tigers in 2018, according to the report (sda/afp)