Earth could lose more than a tenth of its plant and animal species by the end of the century on current trends, according to new research which comes as nearly 3,000 scientists call for action from governments to stop the destruction of nature in the final days of negotiations at Cop15.
The climate crisis will drive an accelerating cascade of extinctions in the coming decades, as predators lose their prey, parasites lose their hosts, and the temperature rises fracture Earth’s web of life, according to the researchers, who warn of the risk of co-extinctions in a paper published on Friday in Science Advances.
From leaf frogs to basking sharks, the extinction risk of plants and animals is typically monitored on the IUCN red list, where scientists have published their analysis on threats to more than 150,388 species, finding that more than 42,000 could go extinct, often due to human behavior.
However, the new research has used a supercomputer to model a synthetic Earth complete with virtual species to understand the effect global heating and land use change could have on the web of life. The researchers say 6% of plants and animals will disappear by 2050 in a middle-of-the-road emissions scenario, which the world appears to be heading for, rising to 13% by the end of the century. In the worst-case scenario of global heating, they estimate 27% of plants and animals could disappear by 2100.
“We have populated a virtual world from the ground up and mapped the resulting fate of thousands of species across the globe to determine the likelihood of real-world tipping points,” said Giovanni Strona, the lead author and a former scientist at the University of Helsinki, now at the European Commission.
“This study is unique because it accounts also for the secondary effect on biodiversity, estimating the effect of species going extinct in local food webs beyond direct effects. The results demonstrate that interlinkages within food webs worsen biodiversity loss,” said the study’s co-author, Prof Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia.