Yahoo News Third of tropical African plants set to go extinct, study suggests
A third of tropical African plants are at risk of extinction, according to detailed new research which warns about the impact of our failure to recognise the role plants play in maintaining ecosystems.
Several countries in western Africa as well as others including Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia are among those expected to be worst affected where researchers believe they could lose up to 40 per cent of wild plants.
Our species is to blame, with the man-made climate crisis and deforestation for agriculture among the main causes.
The research, lead by Dr Thomas Couvreur of the French National Institute for Sustainable Development, assessed over 22,000 species of plants across tropical Africa.
“Our results underline the high level of extinction risk of the tropical African flora. Thirty-three percent of the species are potentially threatened with extinction, and another third of species are likely rare, potentially becoming threatened in the near future,” the paper says.
The team assessed the status of each plant using a system of revised metrics based on those used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which publishes and updates the “red list” of threatened species. The team’s recording techniques allowed them to cover more ground and more species faster than if they had adhered strictly to the IUCN’s criteria.
The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
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