UN: Three Species Per Hour Becoming Extinct*

 May 23rd, 2007 7:24 AM
 By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour
and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since
the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Scientists and environmentalists issued reports about threats to
creatures and plants including right whales, Iberian lynxes, wild
potatoes and peanuts on May 22, the International Day for Biological
Diversity.

"Biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate," U.N. Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. Global warming is adding to
threats such as land clearance for farms or cities, pollution and rising
human populations.

"The global response to these challenges needs to move much more
rapidly, and with more determination at all levels -- global, national
and local," he said.

Many experts reckon the world will fail to meet the goal set by world
leaders at an Earth Summit in 2002 of a "significant reduction" by 2010
in the rate of species losses.

"We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the
disappearance of the dinosaurs," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the U.N.
Convention on Biological Diversity. Dinosaurs vanished 65 million years
ago, perhaps after a meteorite struck.

"Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural
rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species
are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct,"
he said.

"The cause: human activities."

DODO

A "Red List" of endangered species, however, lists only 784 species
driven to extinction since 1500 -- ranging from the dodo bird of
Mauritius to the golden toad of Costa Rica.

Craig Hilton-Taylor, manager of the list compiled by the World
Conservation Union grouping 83 governments as well as scientists and
environmental organizations, said the hugely varying figures might both
be right, in their way.

"The U.N. figures are based on loss of habitats, estimates of how many
species lived there and so will have been lost," he told Reuters. "Ours
are more empirical -- those species we knew were there but cannot find."

U.N. climate experts say global warming, blamed mainly on human use of
fossil fuels, will wreck habitats by drying out the Amazon rainforest,
for instance, or by melting polar ice.

The World Conservation Union also said that one in every six land
mammals in Europe was under threat of extinction, including the Iberian
lynx, Arctic fox and the Mediterranean monk seal.

"The results of the report highlight the challenge we currently face to
halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010," European Commissioner Stavros
Dimas said.

Europe's goal is to halt biodiversity loss by 2010, tougher than the
global target of slowing losses.

Another report by a group of farm researchers said that global warming
may drive many wild varieties of plants such as potatoes and peanuts to
extinction by mid-century, wiping out traits that might help modern
crops resist pests or disease.

The WWF conservation group and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation
Society said that whales, dolphins and porpoises were "facing increasing
threats from climate change" because of factors such as rising sea
temperatures.

A survey in Britain said climate change might actually help some of the
nation's rare wildlife and plants -- such as the greater horseshoe bat
and the turtle dove -- to spread to new areas even as others faced
threats to their survival.

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