by Paul Berth, March 22, 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

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Contrary to what the media tries to make you believe, global climate change is not a major cause of species extinction. A recent study published in March 2019 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment shows that the major cause of extinction is the introduction of invasive alien species (IAS) into ecosystems. This phenomenon, well known to biologists and confirmed by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), is unfortunately little known to the general public.

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Figure 1. Number of recent animal extinctions (IUCN categories “extinct” [EX] and “extinct in the wild” [EW]) for different groups of animals (figures from IUCN Table 3a). The colors provide information on the causes of the extinctions (“Driver”); for example dark purple is used for IAS (“Alien”), extinctions caused by local species (“Native”) are light purple. The category “Neither” includes other causes of extinction or unknown causes (source, Blackburn et al., 2019).

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