Climate change has transformed and degraded habitats and ecosystems — places where animals have spent millions of years adapting — and now, plant and animal species are disappearing faster than at any time in recorded history. Emaciated grizzly bears are starving as the salmon population withers, and a warming Arctic is to blame for a die-off of puffins.
One study estimates there are currently 8.7 million species in the world - 2.14 million of which are animals. A new study from 2023, evaluating the conservation status of 71,000 animal species, has shown that 48% of species are decreasing in number globally.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a monumental Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in 2019. According to the report, one million animals and plants face extinction due to climate change. A more recent analysis, from the World Wildlife Fund in October 2024, reported that Earth’s wildlife populations have fallen on average by a “catastrophic” rate of 73% in the past half-century. The worst declines were in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a 95% average drop, followed by Africa, 76%, and Asia and the Pacific, 60%. But the report said that is at least partly because in Europe, Central Asia and North America — whose animal populations declined by more than a third — people living there had already wiped out nature on a wide scale by 1970.
Extinctions grew worldwide with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Habitat destruction, especially in the tropics, is the major driver. But a confluence of human activities, ranging from climate change to pollution, are combining to drive animal declines.
A 2023 study reports that more than 40% of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians are at risk of vanishing due to climate change. This makes amphibians the most threatened vertebrate class.
Although the Endangered Species Act (a program passed in 1973 for the conservation of threatened and endangered plants, animals, and their habitats) had been credited with saving more than 99% of species listed on it, the Trump administration in 2019 finalized sweeping rollbacks that weakened protections dramatically. In response, 17 state attorneys general sued, a bill was filed in the House to revoke the rollbacks, and activists delivered more than 500,000 petition signatures supporting the Endangered Species Act. The Trump Administration decided to add insult to injury and, in October 2019, passed an executive order to disband two federal advisory boards focused on protecting marine life and battling invasive species.
In June 2021, under the Biden administration, plans changed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service moving to undo much of the Trump administration’s work that altered the ways habitats of plants and animals on the verge of extinction are kept from total collapse.
In March 2024, the Biden administration restored more rules dropped under Trump, including a regulation that mandates blanket protections for threatened species, making it easier to protect wildlife, plants and critical habitat areas.
As expected, the Endangered Species Act came under attack again in Trump’s second term with the administration claiming that ESA’s protections inhibit development and “energy domination.” Since January, Trump has signed multiple executive orders targeting the ESA including: one that prioritizes fossil fuel extraction and energy development over complying with “obstacles” from the ESA; an order weakening protections for federal forests; and one to “put people over fish” by rescinding ESA regulations that “unduly burden” water projects.
In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the NOAA moved to rescind the definition of “harm” under the Act. The proposal would exclude habitat degradation from the definition of “harm,” leaving species at risk as habitat loss is often a driving factor of population decline. The Department of Interior and NOAA cut funding for conservation programs, terminating people who carry out ESA regulations, including park rangers who monitor endangered populations in national parks.
They do. Earth is in the midst of its sixth great extinction. Scientists believe that climate and deforestation are major drivers of biodiversity loss with the U.N. estimating that the world lost 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles) of forest over the past three centuries. Rainforests are home to two-thirds of all species on Earth and they are coming down to make way for cattle, soy, corn, sugarcane and mining. Together, the combination of habitat loss and warming climate are rapidly shrinking and shifting ranges,fragmenting lands available for wildlife, and forcing populations to either climb to higher altitudes or move toward the poles to escape the heat. While some animals can relocate, others are trapped within isolated, contracting scraps of wildland.
As Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, explains, “Climate change is a primary driver of biodiversity loss. And climate change depends on biodiversity as part of the solution. So clearly, the two are linked, and cannot be separated.”
About the wildlife, plants and places currently at risk of disappearing due to the climate crisis.
Percentage of species per taxonomic group that have decreasing, stable, increasing or unknown/unassessed (NA) population trends. Each group is represented by a silhouette from left to right; mammals (N = 5,969), birds (N = 11,162), amphibians (N = 7,316), reptiles (N = 10,150), fishes (N = 24,356) and insects (N = 12,161). Data sourced from the IUCN Red List. Image courtesy of Finn et al. (2023) (CC BY 4.0).
CREDIT: Mongabay Environmental News
