A study published in Science Advances says that species loss rate is 100 times greater than the expected rate and this HAS to be alarming news.

Numerous reports are saying that many of the world’s living organisms are facing extinction due to poaching and a myriad of other irresponsible human activity. For example, the Yangtze giant softshell turtle is endangered, there is only one male northern white rhinoceros left in this world and recent report states that 3 out of 10 marine and land species could go extinct in Singapore. These are all alarming reports and something to be thought about.

The latest paper by Ceballos’s team says we are in the beginning of a sixth mass extinction of animal species on Earth, and humans are the cause. According to the paper, “The number of species that have gone extinct in the last 100 years would have taken anywhere from 800 to 10,000 years to disappear otherwise.”

The background rate of extinction that Ceballos’s team used was one that says two vertebrate species will go extinct per 10,000 species, per 100 years. Based upon this estimate, nine vertebrate species should have disappeared since 1900. In reality, 477 known species have gone extinct since then. This is a conservative estimate in and of itself, since to confidently declare a species extinct takes a significant amount of time and effort to be certain the species is actually gone. Ceballos exhorts that the evidence produced by this study is “incontrovertible” and that our global human society is without a doubt the cause. Climate change, overpopulation, income inequality, land degradation, and overexploitation of animal species have all contributed to the accelerating rates of extinction.

There have been five previous mass die-offs in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, the most famous being that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Though humans are the drivers of the present extinction, eventually the consequences will fall on us as well. Experts purport that biodiversity and ecosystem services are worth $145 trillion globally. This includes providing medicines, crop pollination, water purification, oxygenation of the atmosphere, and countless other services we often take for granted. Ceballos notes in his paper that if the current pace of extinction is allowed to continue, humanity will be deprived of many ecological benefits within as little as three human lifetimes. This type of loss would be virtually permanent in the context of a human time scale, considering the globe took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to re-diversify after previous extinctions.

Despite all the doom and gloom, of which there is clearly plenty to go around, it’s important to note that it is possible to avoid a full-blown sixth extinction with concerted efforts to save threatened species and ease pressures on other animal populations, says Ceballos.

Source: Popular Science.