A new study finds that as plant species go extinct around the world,
ecosystems could become a lot less productive. Rebecca Williams
reports, this could be bad news for the services people depend on from
nature:
Transcript
A new study finds that as plant species go extinct around the world,
ecosystems could become a lot less productive. Rebecca Williams
reports, this could be bad news for the services people depend on from
nature:
Plants work overtime for us. They produce oxygen and food, among a lot
of other things. But many plant species are going extinct.
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says as
we lose plant species, ecosystems could become half as productive as
they are now.
Brad Cardinale is the study’s lead author. He says preserving habitats
could slow the loss of species:
“For every place we build, every place we put a house, every place we
put a mall, we set aside another tract of equal size for the other 10 million
species on the planet to persist.”
Cardinale says we should start setting aside more land soon. Some
estimates suggest as much as half of all known species on Earth could
be extinct by the end of this century.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.