How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?

By Friederike C. Bolam, L. Mair, Marco Angelico, T. Brooks, Mark A. Burgman, Claudia Hermes, M. Hoffmann, Robert W. Martin, P. McGowan, A. Rodrigues and 36 more. bioRxiv, 2020

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure its success, we used a Delphi expert elicitation method to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993 - 2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010 - 2020 (the timing of Aichi Target 12). We found that conservation prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993, and 9–18 bird and 2–7 mammal extinctions since 2010. Many remain highly threatened, and may still become extinct in the near future. Nonetheless, given that ten bird and five mammal species did go extinct (or are strongly suspected to) since 1993, extinction rates would have been 2.9–4.2 times greater without conservation action. While policy commitments have fostered significant conservation achievements, future biodiversity action needs to be scaled up to avert additional extinctions.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e160b5acc411a2e6610c50e7f3f07c791a3dfa68

Citations in the corpus

• The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation? (2022, unknown): “have been greater, such that extrapolating from them to biodiversity as a whole would under-estimate the overall extinction rate (Butchart, Stattersfield & Collar, 2006; Pimm et al., 2006; Young et al., 2014; Bolam et al., 2020).”