The Black-and-White Ruffed Lemur, threat category: Critically Endangered (Photo by Jean-Christophe Vié, courtesy of the IUCN)
There’s a new report out on the
state of the world’s creatures.
It’s called the Red List of Threatened
Species. And, as you can imagine,
the Red List is not a good list to
be on. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
There’s a new report out on the state of the world’s creatures. It’s called the Red List of Threatened Species. And, as you can imagine, the Red List is not a good list to be on. Mark Brush has more:
This report is put out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They cataloged about 45,000 species worldwide. They say about 38% of those are threatened with extinction.
Species sometimes naturally go extinct. But, the researchers say, today’s extinction rates are happening a lot faster – mostly because people are destroying habitat.
Jean-Christophe Vié is the senior editor of the report.
“If you think of nature as a company, it’s the largest in the world. So now we are in this economic crisis, if there was one company to save, it’s not the car industry, or saving a bank – it’s saving nature, because it’s for the benefit of all of us.”
Vié says they were only able to report on about 3% of all the known species around the world.
But, they still feel they have a pretty good idea of the overall trend. And it’s not a good trend.
For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.