World Conservation Issues - Page 21

Researchers from Newcastle University have found that 59 species of fish have disappeared from fishermen’s catches in the Philippines between 1950 and 2014.

The decline can be traced back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR), the only country in which the Grauer’s gorilla is found.

A combination of climate change and habitat loss caused a range wide decline of nearly 4% per year between 1985 and 2013.

Overall, an area the size of around 4,500 football pitches is still being lost every day.

Not only do we kill animals at far higher rates than other predators, we hunt in ways that are particularly destructive.

The west coast population has increased by nine percent and the east coast population has increased by ten percent. These are the highest increases documented worldwide.

James Borrell’s recent TEDx talk on conservation achievements so far. Should we be more optimistic in conservation? Get involved with the debate.

Using fossil records and extinction counts, the researchers compared a highly conservative estimate of current extinctions with a background rate twice as high as those widely used in previous analyses. This way, they brought the two estimates as close to each other as possible.

Widespread persecution by European settlers led to the downfall of this subspecies. The big cats were killed to protect the settlers and their livestock through hunting, trapping, poisoning and bounty programmes.