The earth could face a mass extinction within a century if species continue to disappear at their current rate, scientists claim.
A report in the scientific journal Nature said that despite the conservation attempts of government’s around the globe, thousands of animal types look set to face extinction each year.
And if the current rate of extinction – which is placed at anything from 0.01 percent to 0.7 percent of all existing species per year – a mass extinction of 75 percent of species could take place within 100 years.
‘In general, the state of biodiversity is worsening, in many cases significantly,’ Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at a UN conservation monitoring centre in Cambridge, said in the report.
Nature found that 41 percent of all amphibian species are threatened with extinction, the highest at-risk group. 26 percent of mammal species and 13 percent of bird species are also under threat.
Habitat loss and degradation, coupled with human activity like hunting pose a real danger to wildlife sustainability while climate change will likely accelerate the extinction rate in the future.
One of the major issues, according to the report, is calculating risk to species about which there is little knowledge. Estimates of the number of species of animals, plants and fungi can vary from 2million to more than 50million.
