WE COULD be living through the greatest mass animal extinction of all time, bigger than the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And there seems little we can do to stop it.
So suggested Jonathan Silvertown, professor of ecology in the department of life sciences at the Open University, before an "Ireland in 2030" lecture he gave yesterday in Dublin entitled Fragile Web: What Next for Nature?
The Irish Times/RDS Ireland in 2030 lectures are a series looking at challenges in the coming years.
In his talk at the RDS, Prof Silvertown described the alarmingly high loss of species. One of the most sobering predictions holds that all of the world’s coral reefs and the bounty of life they support could be lost forever by 2050 due to climate change and high atmospheric CO2 levels.
“During the history of life there have been five mega-extinctions, and these have taken place all due to natural causes,” he said. Now we are seeing similar extinction rates caused mainly by humans.
A quarter of all of the 5,500 known mammals are threatened with extinction, and 20 per cent of all bird species are at risk.
Amphibians are under severe pressure at the moment with up to 40 per cent of known species facing extinction, mostly as a result of a fungal infection.
Prof Silvertown told his audience last night about the great variety of life, why it is important to protect it and what we can do to prevent species loss.
Biodiversity was not simply a matter of scientific curiosity. “We eat it; all the food we have is part of life’s variety,” he said. Many foods such as the potato and grains came originally from the wild, and these were modified to produce the food sources we use today. “The genetic resources we need to produce new traits are still found out in the wild,” he said.
Also under threat were entire ecosystems, not just species; the reefs were one example and the rainforest another, he said. A US study had estimated that Florida’s reefs were worth $1 billion (€668 million) a year through the fish life they support.
While Prof Silvertown mainly had unhappy news to report, there were opportunities to change. Global warming could be reversed if governments can agree a way forward. And the regeneration of fisheries was another example of how threatened species could be brought back from the edge.