Seals, birds under threat in new ‘red list’ of endangered species

Arctic seals and birds are coming under increasing threat, mainly due to climate change and human activity, according to an updated list of endangered species released Friday by the world’s top conservation body.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said habitat loss driven by logging and agricultural expansion as a threat to birds, while seals were at risk mostly due to global warming and human activities including maritime traffic.

The IUCN said it was changing the status of the hooded seal from vulnerable to endangered while bearded and harp seals are now classified as near threatened.

“This timely global update highlights the ever increasing impact human activity is having on nature and the climate and the devastating effects this has,” its director general Grethel Aguilar told reporters at its World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi.

The IUCN red list now includes “172,620 species of which 48,646 are threatened with extinction,” it said in a statement.

Global warming is destroying the natural habitat of animals including seals that live in the cold parts of the world. Maritime traffic, mining and oil extraction, industrial fishing and hunting are among other risks to the species.

“Global warming is occurring four times faster in the Arctic than in other regions, which is drastically reducing the extent and duration of sea ice cover,” the IUCN said.

“Ice-dependent seals are a key food source for other animals,” it added.

They “play a central role in the food web, consuming fish and invertebrates and recycling nutrients” and are one of the “keystone species” of their ecosystem.

Kit Kovacs, a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute, raised the alarm about the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

“When I lived in the archipelago, just a couple of decades ago, we had five months of sea ice cover in areas that are now winter ice-free. It is really hard to express just how rapidly the Arctic is changing,” she said.

The IUCN said its red list of birds is the fruit of nine years of work by “thousands of experts”.

“Overall, 61% of bird species have declining populations — an estimate that has increased from 44 percent in 2016,” the IUCN said.

It studied thousands of bird species worldwide and found that “1,256 (or 11.5%) of the 11,185 species assessed are globally threatened”.

This year’s update focused on regions where the destruction of tropical forest poses a growing threat to birds. In Madagascar, 14 species were newly classified as near threatened and three others were labelled vulnerable. In West Africa, five more bird species were found to be near threatened in addition to one more in Central America.

The report also mentioned a positive development. The green turtle is no longer endangered, it said, citing “decades of sustained conservation action” that saw its population recover by 28% since the 1970s.

Nicolas Pilcher, the Executive Director of the Marine Research Foundation, said this success should spur action not complacency.

“Just because we have reached this great step in conservation isn’t a reason to sit back and then become complacent,” he said.