Almost half of all life on Earth is “declining towards extinction... putting human wellbeing under increasing threat”, a grim new report from Queen’s University Belfast has found.
The work was led by PhD student Catherine Finn and Dr Daniel Pincheira-Donoso from Queen’s School of Biological Sciences alongside Dr Florencia Grattarola from the Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague.
In the most comprehensive research of its kind to date, the team looked at the population density changes of 71,114 species across the globe. And they found the impact of human industrialisation on these 5,969 mammals, 11,162 birds, 10,150 reptiles, 7,316 amphibians, 24,356 fish and 12,161 insects is significantly more alarming than previously thought.
