Planethopia

Individual species may not matter much on their own, but collectively they form ecosystems that provide a range of vital “ecosystem services”, such as recycling waste, cleaning water, absorbing carbon and maintaining the chemistry of the oceans. Although we know that high levels of biodiversity are essential to healthy ecosystems, but it is not yet clear how much can be lost before ecosystems collapse, nor which  species are the key players in a given ecosystem. We shall consider proposed crude extinction rates as the best “interim indicator” of the state of ecosystems. They put the current extinction rate at more than 100 extinctions per million species in one year time and rising. That compares with a natural “background” extinction rate of around 0.3. Up to 30% of all mammal, bird and amphibian species will be threatened with extinction in this century.

This cannot go on safely as current rates may even mirror those of the “big five” mass extinctions of the past half-billion years, including the meteorite strike that did for the dinosaurs. While the world carried on after those events, it was massively transformed. To avoid a repeat, some scientists suggest a safe long-term annual extinction rate of no more than 10 per million species per year. By that measure humanity has already entered deep into a danger zone, if the current extinction rate is sustained.

Conclusion is that we are driving species to extinction by ploughing up or paving over their habitats, by introducing alien species like rats and weeds, by poisoning them with pollution, by hunting them for food and increasingly, by changing the climate.

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