The sixth extinction
Wild vertebrate populations fall by around seventy per cent in fifty years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 55 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Habitat conversion, hunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change have driven extinction rates estimated at tens to hundreds of times the background rate. Monitored wild vertebrate populations have declined around 70 per cent since 1970, and insect biomass has fallen sharply where measured. Wild mammals now constitute a few per cent of mammal biomass; humans and livestock are the rest. Whether this constitutes a mass extinction in the geological sense is argued, but the trajectory is not.