Transforming crop and timber production could reduce species extinction risk by 40%
Ensuring sustainability of crop and timber production would mitigate the greatest drivers of terrestrial wildlife decline, responsible for 40% of the overall extinction risk of amphibians, birds and mammals, according to a paper published on Apr.8. These results were generated using a new metric which, for the first time, allows business, governments and civil society to assess their potential contributions to stemming global species loss, and can be used to calculate national, regional, sector-based, or institution-specific targets. The work was led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Post-2020 Taskforce, hosted by Newcastle University (UK), in collaboration with scientists from 54 institutions in 21 countries around the world.
“For years, a major impediment to engaging companies, governments and others in biodiversity conservation has been the inability to measure the impact of their efforts,” said IUCN Director General Dr Bruno Oberle. “By quantifying their contributions, the new STAR metric can bring all these actors together around the common objective of preserving the diversity of life on Earth. We need concerted global action to safeguard the world’s biodiversity, and with it our own safety and wellbeing.”
The authors applied the new STAR (Species Threat Abatement and Restoration) metric to all species of amphibians, birds, and mammals – groups of terrestrial vertebrate species that are comprehensively assessed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM. They found that removing threats to wildlife from crop production would reduce global extinction risk across these groups by 24%. Ending threats caused by unsustainable logging globally would reduce this by a further 16%, while removing threats associated with invasive alien species would bring a further 10% reduction, according to the paper. STAR can also be used to calculate the benefits of restoration: global extinction risk could potentially be reduced by 56% through comprehensive restoration of threatened species’ habitats, according to the paper.
Actions that benefit more species, and in particular the most threatened species, yield higher STAR scores. The results reveal that safeguarding “key biodiversity areas”, covering just 9% of land surface, could reduce global extinction risk by almost half (47%). While every country contributes to the global STAR score, conservation in five megadiverse countries could reduce global extinction risk by almost a third (31%), with Indonesia alone potentially contributing 7%.
“We are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and resources are limited, but our study shows that extinction risk is concentrated in relatively small areas with greater numbers of highly threatened species. The STAR methodology allows us to consistently measure where and how conservation and restoration could have the biggest impact,” said Louise Mair of Newcastle University, lead author of the study. “At the same time, our analysis shows that threats to species are omnipresent, and that action to stem the loss of life on Earth must happen in all countries without exception.”
Source: International Union for Conservation of Nature
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