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Global warming threatens a third of world's habitats |
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August 31, 2000
LONDON (AP) - Global warming could fundamentally transform a third of the world's plant and animal habitats by the end of this century, threatening many species with extinction, an international conservation organization warned Wednesday. In the most vulnerable arctic and northern forest areas, 20 percent of species could die out due to shrinking habitat, the World Wide Fund for Nature said in a new report. "As global warming accelerates, plants and animals will come under increasing pressure to migrate to find suitable habitat," said the report's co-author, Adam Markham, executive director of the U.S.-based group Clean Air-Cool Planet. "Some will just not be able to move fast enough," Markham said. The northern latitudes of Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, where climate change is expected to occur fastest, could lose 70 percent of their habitat, the report said, while coastal and island areas will be at risk from warming oceans and rising waters. In several countries - including Russia, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Georgia - and in seven Canadian provinces and territories, more than half the existing habitat is at risk, the report said. More than a third of habitat is in danger in the U.S. states of Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, it said. The report - written by Markham and University of Toronto professor Jay Malcolm - bases its projections on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubling from pre-industrial levels by the year 2100. And even that estimate is optimistic, the report said. Current levels of carbon dioxide - the gas primarily responsible for global warming - are about 30 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, and could hit double the pre-industrial level by 2050, the World Wide Fund said. The loss of habitat would place many plant and animal species in a race for their lives, and scientists do not yet know whether they would be able to migrate fast enough to outrun the change. "Global warming is likely to have a winnowing effect on ecosystems, filtering out those that are not highly mobile and favoring a less diverse, more 'weedy' vegetation or systems dominated by pioneer species," the report said. It said the most vulnerable species are those who live in isolated or fragmented habitats, including the Gelada baboon of Ethiopia; the Australian mountain pygmy possum; the monarch butterfly, which spends its winters in Mexico; and the spoon-billed sandpiper of Siberia. The report is designed to pressure politicians ahead of November's international climate-change summit in the Dutch city of The Hague, at which politicians will attempt to ratify the 1997 Kyoto agreement limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. "Many countries are trying to find loopholes in the Kyoto agreement," said Andrew Kerr of the WWF's Climate Change campaign. "They should know that the problem is much more of an immediate threat than they realized." |