Threatened With Extinction?

Given that agricultural land is expanding at the expense of forests, marine stocks are being decimated by overfishing and coral reefs are getting clogged by plastic, it comes as no real surprise that plant and animal species are getting decimated. In 2019, the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that human activity is having a devastating impact on the environment. “Nature makes human development possible but our relentless demand for the earth’s resources is accelerating extinction rates and devastating the world’s ecosystems," Joyce Msuya of the UN Environment Programme said at the time, and what was true then is even more true five years later.

According to the latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, published this week, 46,337 of the 166,061 assessed species are now threatened with extinction, meaning they're categorized as either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable. For the first time, the IUCN Red List also includes the majority of the world's trees, finding that at least 16,425 of the 47,282 assessed species are at risk of extinction. The report highlighted the critical importance of trees to many ecosystems, given their role in carbon, water and nutrient cycles, soil formation and climate regulation, meaning that the threat to trees puts many other species at risk as well.

With more than 3 in 10 tree species under threat, trees are among the more endangered groups of species on the IUCN Red List. Our chart provides an overview of the proportion of threatened species within comprehensively assessed groups. The IUCN Red List only provides the proportion of extant species under threat for groups containing at least 150 species that have been comprehensively assessed, meaning that at least 80 percent of the group's species have been assessed. To date, more than 166,000 species have been assessed for the Red List. To further improve the IUCN Red List's ability to provide up-to-date information on the world's biodiversity, the official goal is to assess 260,000 species by 2030 and to reassess 142,000 of those species.