Photograph by: Enric Sala, National Geographic
February 8, 2020
It’s called the Extinction Wing. Located in a dark corner of the Paris Museum of Natural History, it houses a haunting collection of species that have long vanished from the natural world. With biodiversity declining faster than at any time in human history, what size museum will future generations need?
January 25, 2020
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatan Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called The Sixth Extinction, the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed by human activities.
December 31, 2019
At the end of a tumultuous decade for biodiversity, in which a report based on the most comprehensive study of life on Earth warned that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history”, we spoke to some of the world’s leading voices on the environment about their greatest fears for the next decade – and also their hopes. As the IPBES report’s authors noted: “It is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global.”
December 2, 2019
How much time do we have left? This question concerns more and more people who are aware of the consequences and urgency of climate change and species extinction. A lot of time has been lost, but there is a date that must be delivered: the international community must agree on ambitious goals at the World Biodiversity Summit in October 2020.
December 16, 2019S
Some big numbers from nature made news in 2019. They were enough of a shock to get people talking about the dwindling diversity of plants, animals and other life on Earth, and what to do about it.
November 26, 2019
The world's countries have to cut their greenhouse gas emissions well beyond current pledges to make up for lost time - or face catastrophic climate changes, says a United Nations report released on Tuesday.
November 22, 2019
About one in every three plant species in Africa is at the risk of extinction due to climate change, a study has revealed. Researchers classified about 7,000 out of more than 22,000 vascular plant species in Africa as "likely or potentially" threatened, the report said, pointing towards the losses of biodiversity, rapid human population growth, changes in land use, and the effects of changing the climate as reasons behind the disappearance.
October 10, 2019
As many as five billion people, particularly in Africa and South Asia, are likely to face shortages of food and clean water in the coming decades as nature declines. Hundreds of millions more could be vulnerable to increased risks of severe coastal storms, according to the first-ever model examining how nature and humans can survive together.
October 4, 2019
This report documents losses of North American avifauna over the 48 years between 1970 and 2018. Based on their use of range-wide population trajectories and size estimates, they found wide-spread population declines of birds indicating a net loss approaching 3 billion birds, or 29 percent of 1970 abundance.
September 23, 2019
The Earth is facing a dual crisis of rapid climate change and unprecedented biodiversity loss. A recent UN report on biodiversity estimates the global rate of species extinction is currently tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.
May 12, 2019
When the findings of a landmark UN report on biodiversity came out last week, the headlines ran the gamut from depressing to apocalyptic. One million species face extinction, readers were told. Almost a third of the world’s reef-forming coral species, more than a third of its marine mammals, and 40 percent of its amphibian species could die out. And that’s just the number of species.
May 11, 2019
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago […] A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.
May 7, 2019
Akagera National Park was badly degraded by poachers and settlers, but thanks to an innovative conservation effort it is now home again to the Big Five and a growing tourism business.
May 7, 2019
We humans pride ourselves on our ability to look beyond immediate concerns and think on a grander scale. […] Yet we are often poor at focusing on and understanding the things which really matter. A new mass extinction is under way, and this time we are mostly responsible. The new UN Global Assessment Report warns that a million plant and animal species are at risk of being wiped out.
May 6, 2019
A new global assessment from the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was issued today by 150 of the world's leading scientists, painting a grim picture of the state of the planet's lands, ocean, and wildlife. It finds that the loss of nature and the resulting wildlife extinction crisis is worse than previously understood and underscores the urgent need for world leaders to commit to an ambitious global deal to protect nature and, therefore, life on Earth.
