Species can become extinct when humans overhunt and fish, pollute the environment, destroy habitats, and introduce new species to areas. Factories can pollute air and oceans. Common threats to wildlife habitat include unsustainable agriculture, logging, transportation, residential or commercial development, energy production and mining, the report notes, adding that river and stream fragmentation and water extraction are also prevalent causes in freshwater ecosystems. Overfishing is a particularly big problem for fish, accounting for 55 percent of the threats faced by fish populations.
Wildlife populations have declined more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, according to a major report by the conservation group WWF. If we lived here in ordinary time, understood in the long and slow sense of a geological era, it would be almost impossible to see a species disappear. Such an event would occur infrequently for a person to witness. In the case of mammals, the best-studied group of animals, the fossil record indicates that “the background extinction rate, the one that prevailed before humans entered the scene, is so low that in the course of a millennium, a single species should disappear.
But track all of this and you come face to face with the same culprit. Wilson has pointed out that humans are the “first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force. Many scientists argue that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or era of man. This time, in other words, we are the asteroid.
Among the most important measures is the 30x30 campaign, which will protect wildlife places and habitats, including oceans, rivers, forests, deserts and swamps. We are also helping to strengthen the way protected areas are managed and improve the connections between them so that wildlife can move more freely. Factors thought to lead to the onset of pandemics, including habitat loss and wildlife use and trade, are also some of the factors driving wildlife decline. In the past two years, at least five whales have died after eating too much plastic, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Leading the team, called WWF Wildlife Practice, is Margaret Kinnaird, who has more than 30 years of conservation experience in Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya and the United States. Human activities have caused the world's wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds over the past 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. Scientists have long warned that the world is entering a sixth mass extinction, driven by humanity's consumption of wildlife and wilderness, and the burning of fossil fuels. BIRDS Birds are found in almost every habitat on the planet and are often the most visible and familiar wildlife to people around the world.
Others are being driven to extinction to support international wildlife trade, or are being killed when they come into direct conflict with humans and livestock. The report analyzed thousands of different wildlife species monitored by conservation scientists in habitats around the world. But our planet's wildlife is in crisis: numbers have more than halved since 1970 and species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate.