The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has added over 1,000 species of plants and animals to its Red List of Threatened Species, bringing the total to 45,000.

The additional species in the annual update include the Bornean elephant, now classified as ‘endangered’, the Gran Canaria giant lizard, and the copiapoa cacti native to Chile’s Atacama coastal desert.

Climate change and invasive species are identified as primary threats, along with human activities such as illegal trading and major infrastructure projects.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the world’s most comprehensive source on the global extinction risk status of animal, fungus, and plant species. To date, it includes assessments of 163,040 species, an increase of about 6,000 from last year.

“As today’s update shows, biodiversity faces increasing pressures, from poaching to climate change to the spread of invasive species,” Grethel Aguilar, director general at IUCN, said in a statement.

“With sustained, collaborative, science-based conservation action at a sufficient scale, we can pull species back from the brink of extinction.”

SPECIES IN THE SPOTLIGHT

According to the IUCN, an estimated 1,000 Bornean elephants remain in the wild, facing challenges due to habitat loss driven by extensive deforestation, agriculture (specifically palm oil), timber plantations, mining, and projects such as the Pan Borneo Highway.

Moreover, as the human population has rapidly expanded in the Malaysian state of Sabah, elephants are entering human-dominated landscapes more often in search of food, where they may cause damage to crops and face retribution killing, IUCN said.

On the Canary Islands, invasive snakes have brought about a significant decline in reptile species, including the Gran Canaria giant lizard and the Gran Canaria skink, whose population has dropped by more than half since 2014.

As for plants, IUCN said that 82% of copiapoa cacti species, endemic to the Atacama coastal desert in Chile, are now at risk of extinction, up from 55% in 2013.

Notably, the report said the fashion for copiapoa cacti as an ornamental species in Europe and Asia led to an increase in illegal trade facilitated by social media.

“The development of roads and housing has brought more people to the area, making the plants more accessible to poachers and destroying their desert habitat,” IUCN said.

Since its inception in 1964, the Red List has played a hugely important part in global efforts to avoid species extinction, allowing governments to determine which conservation actions they should undertake, especially in the Global South.

As well, the IUCN Red List is slated to play a fundamental role in the nascent voluntary biodiversity credit market, with several crediting methodologies, such as the ones developed by Cercarbono and BioCarbon, being in part based on the list.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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