Are We Next?

Despite conservation attempts by governments across the world to save endangered species, thousands of animal types continue to face extinction every year.

The scientific journal Nature found that 41 per cent of all amphibian species are threatened with extinction, the highest at risk group. A more modest, but still alarming, 26 per cent of mammal species and 13 per cent of bird species are also threatened. The most recent Red List of Threatened Species, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, counts around 46,000 critically endangered species, but it is thought that more species could be at risk.

Habitat loss and degradation, as well as specific human activity such as hunting pose a significant hazard to wildlife sustainability and these pressures are only increasing. Similarly, it is thought that climate change will accelerate the rate of extinctions in the future. Current estimates assume that the rate of extinction is anything from 0.01 per cent to 0.7 per cent of all existing species each year. If this were to continue it would constitute a mass extinction, defined as a loss of 75 per cent of species, in the next few hundred years.

Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at a UN conservation monitoring centre in Cambridge, said in the report: “In general the state of biodiversity is worsening, in many cases significantly.”

After two weeks of negotiations, the world has yet again failed to take any meaningful actions to prevent landmark global warming.  Environmentalists warn that these individual pledges, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), will likely be too week to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, beyond which scientists say increasingly severe heatwaves, rainfall, flooding and rising sea levels will likely occur.

Pablo Solon, former Bolivian ambassador and current director of the activist think tank Focus on the Global South, wrote that the COP20 outcome is "unacceptable for the people and Mother Earth and represents a roadmap to global burning…”

"We are on a path to three or four degrees with this outcome," Tasneem Essop, international climate strategist for WWF, told the Guardian "This gives us no level of comfort that we will be able to close the emissions gap to get emissions to peak before 2020."

Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development, agreed: "It sucks. It is taking us backwards."

"Once again poorer nations have been bullied by the industrialized world into accepting an outcome which leaves many of their citizens facing the grim prospect of catastrophic climate change," said Friends of the Earth’s International climate campaigner Asad Rehman in a statement. "The only thing these talks have achieved is to reduce the chances of a fair and effective agreement to tackle climate change in Paris next year."

"Countries have failed to represent the interests of their people in these negotiations," said Niranjali Amerasinghe, Director of the Climate & Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). "The decision they adopted is empty and does not come close to the ambition required to deal with the climate crisis. It is unacceptable."

The current system of economic organisation, capitalism, is the main impediment to the changes needed to save the world.