Status: 13.10.2022 12:42 p.m
In the past 50 years, wild vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 69 percent. This is the result of a WWF study. The reasons for this are agriculture, pollution – and the climate crisis.
The populations of wild vertebrates have shrunk massively in the past 50 years. The animal populations studied declined by an average of 69 percent between 1970 and 2018, writes the environmental foundation WWF and the London Zoological Society in the study “Living Planet Report 2022”. The report is based on scientific studies of 32,000 stocks of 5230 vertebrate species. These include mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles.
Regional differences
Some regions are more affected than others: According to this, vertebrate populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have shrunk by 94 percent in the past 50 years. Strong declines in tropical and subtropical regions are therefore offset by a slight recovery in stocks in Europe and Central Asia.
According to the report, one of the most endangered species is the western lowland gorilla. Its population in a national park in Cameroon shrank by around 69 percent between 2005 and 2019 alone. The Amazon river dolphin population in Brazil declined by around 67 percent from 1994 to 2016. And even if the situation in South America is particularly critical, species native to us are also affected by the development: the population of skylarks in Europe fell by around 56 percent from 1980 to 2019.
Amazon dolphin populations have plummeted.
Image: picture alliance / Photoshot
Agriculture, pollution, climate crisis
The main reasons for the development are the destruction of habitats mainly due to agriculture and pollution. Poaching and overfishing also threaten biodiversity. And of course the climate crisis also plays a major role – there is a “fatal interaction” with the extinction of species. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the impact of the climate crisis on biodiversity will increase dramatically by 2100. “Conversely, the progressive loss of biological diversity is further fueling the climate crisis.”
This connection can be observed particularly well in the African forest elephant, writes the WWF. Its stocks have already declined by more than 90 percent in some areas. But without the forest elephant, the composition of the forest changes so that it can store significantly less carbon.
“Planet Overexploitation”
“We’re overexploiting the planet,” said WWF Germany board member Christoph Heinrich when the report was presented. The human footprint must be reduced worldwide, he warned, referring to the annual land use that exceeds the biological capacities of the earth. According to Heinrich, nature is like a tower in which each building block represents an animal or plant species, explained Christoph Heinrich, Managing Director of WWF Germany. The more species become extinct, the more unstable it becomes. “We are currently destroying this tower with a jackhammer and are losing our livelihoods with our eyes wide open.”
Hope for species protection conference
The authors of the report called on politicians to implement the climate goals of the Paris Agreement and to expand renewable energies. In addition, poaching and illegal trade in endangered species must be stopped. WWF demanded to stop habitat loss, limit global warming and end the overexploitation of animals and nature.
As a possible opportunity to stop the dying, the WWF called the UN endangered species conference. At the December meeting in Montréal, Canada, a global agreement on the conservation of biological diversity is to be negotiated. The WWF called on the federal government to “commit itself to ambitious goals for our nature and to increase Germany’s international biodiversity funding to at least two billion euros a year by 2025”.
Examples of successful species protection
According to the WWF, the growing stocks of white-tailed eagles in northern Germany show that the extinction of species can be stopped. In 1945 there was only one pair of territories in Schleswig-Holstein, but in 2010 there were 57. The population of gray seals in the Baltic Sea increased by 139 percent from 2013 to 2019 alone. In Nepal, the tiger population grew 91 percent from 121 individuals in 2009 to 235 tigers in 2018, according to the report.