endangered species problem solution essay

Preventing Extinction: Strategies for Protecting Endangered Species

Biodiversity is at a higher risk of extinction than ever before, and there is an urgent need to prevent global extinction. Endangered species are endangered by deforestation, climate change, and human intrusion. There is a need for comprehensive policies that will protect these vulnerable animals and stabilize our ecosystem immediately. By thinking outside the box, we can improve our conservation efforts to address the many risks that life on Earth faces. Let’s discuss strategies that ensure that extinction does not occur.

Climate Change

Everything ranging from climate to the life of different species is affected by global warming. In this respect, endangered species have an extra challenge for survival. Let’s think about how the changing weather hinders attempts to protect and even save them in some instances.

Habitat Disruption

One thing that climate change does is disrupts natural habitats. The living places of endangered species can be greatly altered by increasing temperatures and changing climatic conditions. Consequently, they may lose their homes, which makes it difficult for them to find food, mate, or complete their daily routine. As a result, preserving endangered species becomes much more challenging when they are inhabiting shifting landscapes.

Mismatched Timing

Climate change may alter the timing of certain events critical to species’ survival. For instance, temperature changes and seasonal shifts can affect flowering time for plants or migration periods for some animals. Non-alignment of these shifts with specific requirements of endangered species messes up their cycle of life. This incongruity makes it harder for individuals of such species to hunt and reproduce as well as nurse young ones, which further stresses already strained populations.

Limited Resources

Climate change has far-reaching effects beyond temperature and precipitation; it also affects resource availability. Changing rainfall patterns, water sources, and availability of food can make it hard for any endangered animal to find what they need in order to survive. However, this becomes much more complicated when underpinning climatic factors cease to be uniform or predictable like before, thus making conservation efforts intricate for these creatures that rely on them.

Effective Strategies for Preventing Extinction

To preserve the balance of our planet’s ecosystems, it is crucial that we prevent extinction. When species disappear, this interrupts the natural arrangement and changes everything from food chains to climate control. What is urgent is biodiversity conservation in order to ensure the survival of different species and ultimately ensure a sustainable future for our planet.

Science, Policy, and Public Engagement

Efficient strategies for preventing extinction are multifaceted as they encompass science, policy, and public engagement. Scientists have a central role in studying endangered species and their habitats and developing ways of conserving them. At the same time, strong policies are required to enforce protective measures and regulate human activities that contribute to endangerment. Engaging the public helps create awareness among the people concerning these issues, thus making them a community concern.

Preserving Habitat

Preventing extinction starts with preserving natural habitats. Many species face severe threats due to habitat destruction and fragmentation. It is important that any efforts geared at conserving these environments prioritize their protection as well as restoration to guarantee that the threatened species can get enough space, resources, and conditions needed for survival. Safeguarding space will become a savior to numerous plants on Earth as well as animals that face imminent risk of extinction.

Collaboration on a Global Scale

Extinction shall be prevented by global collaboration. Many of these endangered animals cross borders, necessitating international cooperation in their preservation. Knowledge sharing on a global scale enhances the impact of conservation initiatives through pooling together resources and expertise from various parts of the world; for global collaboration, actions such as collaborations, agreements, and partnerships are established since all countries should be against extinction, showing how responsibility is shared among nations and communities globally.

Innovative Conservation Technologies

Innovative conservation technologies offer a glimmer of hope in the face of saving the earth’s biodiversity. These front-line solutions channel scientific and technological advancements to address issues that are faced by animals under threat of extinction. Let’s go on and see how these innovations shape the future of conservation.

Drones Revolutionizing Wildlife Monitoring

Drones, which were initially used for aerial photography and delivery purposes, are now changing wildlife monitoring. These unmanned aircraft provide a view from above in remote habitats, making it easier for scientists to follow elusive species. From counting populations to tracking habitats, drones provide a non-invasive and efficient way to acquire important data for conservation purposes.

Preserving Biodiversity through Genetic Conservation

Gene tools are essential to conservationists for biodiversity preservation. These advanced genetic techniques help to safeguard the gene pool of endangered species. By understanding and maintaining unique genetic differences among populations, we can improve the survival chances of threatened species under ever-changing ecological conditions.

Remote Sensing

Satellite remote sensing allows scientists to monitor areas such as inaccessibility or endangered status. This technology helps assess changes in the environment, deforestation, and habitat loss, thereby providing critical information needed for effective planning and timely intervention aimed at protecting vulnerable ecosystems.

Empowering Individuals in Conservation Efforts

Also, innovation has led to citizen science initiatives that enable people to take part in environmental conservation. People can increasingly report observations about rare species and environmental change through mobile apps or websites. Apart from improving data collection, it also creates shared responsibility among people concerning maintaining diverse ecosystems within our planet.

Automated Bioacoustic Monitoring Devices

Nature’s detectives refer to automated bioacoustic monitoring devices that listen to the sounds made by wild animals so as to understand their behaviors. These devices have been improved technologically such that they can detect and analyze animal noises, thereby giving important information on species distribution, abundance, and even welfare. They use these gadgets to “listen” to nature, hence conserving biodiversity.

The Role of Camera Traps

Camera traps are like silent guardians in the wild that capture fleeting glimpses of wildlife without disrupting their natural habitats. Pictures or videos are taken whenever an animal crosses this device with motion detectors. The figures enable scientists to see into the secret lives of animals, thus helping them study behavior and population dynamics or even detect rare or endangered species in human-uninhabited areas.

Challenges and Future Prospects

Nevertheless, there are challenges like accessibility, affordability, and ethical concerns that must be solved if these technologies will ever reach their full potential. Overcoming such challenges while ensuring widespread access with responsible use marks the future of innovative conservation technologies. Constantly improving technology and being ethical in practice is key to enhancing the effects of these innovations on the ongoing fight to save our planet’s rich biodiversity.

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November 1, 2023

20 min read

Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?

The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis

By Robert Kunzig

Snail Darter Percina tanasi. Listed as Endangered: 1975. Status: Delisted in 2022.

© Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

A Bald Eagle disappeared into the trees on the far bank of the Tennessee River just as the two researchers at the bow of our modest motorboat began hauling in the trawl net. Eagles have rebounded so well that it's unusual not to see one here these days, Warren Stiles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me as the net got closer. On an almost cloudless spring morning in the 50th year of the Endangered Species Act, only a third of a mile downstream from the Tennessee Valley Authority's big Nickajack Dam, we were searching for one of the ESA's more notorious beneficiaries: the Snail Darter. A few months earlier Stiles and the FWS had decided that, like the Bald Eagle, the little fish no longer belonged on the ESA's endangered species list. We were hoping to catch the first nonendangered specimen.

Dave Matthews, a TVA biologist, helped Stiles empty the trawl. Bits of wood and rock spilled onto the deck, along with a Common Logperch maybe six inches long. So did an even smaller fish; a hair over two inches, it had alternating vertical bands of dark and light brown, each flecked with the other color, a pattern that would have made it hard to see against the gravelly river bottom. It was a Snail Darter in its second year, Matthews said, not yet full-grown.

Everybody loves a Bald Eagle. There is much less consensus about the Snail Darter. Yet it epitomizes the main controversy still swirling around the ESA, signed into law on December 28, 1973, by President Richard Nixon: Can we save all the obscure species of this world, and should we even try, if they get in the way of human imperatives? The TVA didn't think so in the 1970s, when the plight of the Snail Darter—an early entry on the endangered species list—temporarily stopped the agency from completing a huge dam. When the U.S. attorney general argued the TVA's case before the Supreme Court with the aim of sidestepping the law, he waved a jar that held a dead, preserved Snail Darter in front of the nine judges in black robes, seeking to convey its insignificance.

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Now I was looking at a living specimen. It darted around the bottom of a white bucket, bonking its nose against the side and delicately fluttering the translucent fins that swept back toward its tail.

“It's kind of cute,” I said.

Matthews laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “I like this guy!” he said. “Most people are like, ‘Really? That's it?’ ” He took a picture of the fish and clipped a sliver off its tail fin for DNA analysis but left it otherwise unharmed. Then he had me pour it back into the river. The next trawl, a few miles downstream, brought up seven more specimens.

In the late 1970s the Snail Darter seemed confined to a single stretch of a single tributary of the Tennessee River, the Little Tennessee, and to be doomed by the TVA's ill-considered Tellico Dam, which was being built on the tributary. The first step on its twisting path to recovery came in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, surprisingly, that the ESA gave the darter priority even over an almost finished dam. “It was when the government stood up and said, ‘Every species matters, and we meant it when we said we're going to protect every species under the Endangered Species Act,’” says Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Delisted in 2007. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Today the Snail Darter can be found along 400 miles of the river's main stem and multiple tributaries. ESA enforcement has saved dozens of other species from extinction. Bald Eagles, American Alligators and Peregrine Falcons are just a few of the roughly 60 species that had recovered enough to be “delisted” by late 2023.

And yet the U.S., like the planet as a whole, faces a growing biodiversity crisis. Less than 6 percent of the animals and plants ever placed on the list have been delisted; many of the rest have made scant progress toward recovery. What's more, the list is far from complete: roughly a third of all vertebrates and vascular plants in the U.S. are vulnerable to extinction, says Bruce Stein, chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. Populations are falling even for species that aren't yet in danger. “There are a third fewer birds flying around now than in the 1970s,” Stein says. We're much less likely to see a White-throated Sparrow or a Red-winged Blackbird, for example, even though neither species is yet endangered.

The U.S. is far emptier of wildlife sights and sounds than it was 50 years ago, primarily because habitat—forests, grasslands, rivers—has been relentlessly appropriated for human purposes. The ESA was never designed to stop that trend, any more than it is equipped to deal with the next massive threat to wildlife: climate change. Nevertheless, its many proponents say, it is a powerful, foresightful law that we could implement more wisely and effectively, perhaps especially to foster stewardship among private landowners. And modest new measures, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act—a bill with bipartisan support—could further protect flora and fauna.

That is, if special interests don't flout the law. After the 1978 Supreme Court decision, Congress passed a special exemption to the ESA allowing the TVA to complete the Tellico Dam. The Snail Darter managed to survive because the TVA transplanted some of the fish from the Little Tennessee, because remnant populations turned up elsewhere in the Tennessee Valley, and because local rivers and streams slowly became less polluted following the 1972 Clean Water Act, which helped fish rebound.

Under pressure from people enforcing the ESA, the TVA also changed the way it managed its dams throughout the valley. It started aerating the depths of its reservoirs, in some places by injecting oxygen. It began releasing water from the dams more regularly to maintain a minimum flow that sweeps silt off the river bottom, exposing the clean gravel that Snail Darters need to lay their eggs and feed on snails. The river system “is acting more like a real river,” Matthews says. Basically, the TVA started considering the needs of wildlife, which is really what the ESA requires. “The Endangered Species Act works,” Matthews says. “With just a little bit of help, [wildlife] can recover.”

The trouble is that many animals and plants aren't getting that help—because government resources are too limited, because private landowners are alienated by the ESA instead of engaged with it, and because as a nation the U.S. has never fully committed to the ESA's essence. Instead, for half a century, the law has been one more thing that polarizes people's thinking.

I t may seem impossible today to imagine the political consensus that prevailed on environmental matters in 1973. The U.S. Senate approved the ESA unanimously, and the House passed it by a vote of 390 to 12. “Some people have referred to it as almost a statement of religion coming out of the Congress,” says Gary Frazer, who as assistant director for ecological services at the FWS has been overseeing the act's implementation for nearly 25 years.

Gopher Tortoise Gopherus polyphemus . Listed as Threatened: 1987. Status: Still threatened. Credit: ©Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

But loss of faith began five years later with the Snail Darter case. Congresspeople who had been thinking of eagles, bears and Whooping Cranes when they passed the ESA, and had not fully appreciated the reach of the sweeping language they had approved, were disabused by the Supreme Court. It found that the legislation had created, “wisely or not ... an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said after the Snail Darter case concluded. Even a recently discovered tiny fish had to be saved, “whatever the cost,” he wrote in the decision.

Was that wise? For both environmentalists such as Curry and many nonenvironmentalists, the answer has always been absolutely. The ESA “is the basic Bill of Rights for species other than ourselves,” says National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who is building a “photo ark” of every animal visible to the naked eye as a record against extinction. (He has taken studio portraits of 15,000 species so far.) But to critics, the Snail Darter decision always defied common sense. They thought it was “crazy,” says Michael Bean, a leading ESA expert, now retired from the Environmental Defense Fund. “That dichotomy of view has remained with us for the past 45 years.”

According to veteran Washington, D.C., environmental attorney Lowell E. Baier, author of a new history called The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, both the act itself and its early implementation reflected a top-down, federal “command-and-control mentality” that still breeds resentment. FWS field agents in the early days often saw themselves as combat biologists enforcing the act's prohibitions. After the Northern Spotted Owl's listing got tangled up in a bitter 1990s conflict over logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, the FWS became more flexible in working out arrangements. “But the dark mythology of the first 20 years continues in the minds of much of America,” Baier says.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( map ); Source: David Matthews, Tennessee Valley Authority ( reference )

The law can impose real burdens on landowners. Before doing anything that might “harass” or “harm” an endangered species, including modifying its habitat, they need to get a permit from the FWS and present a “habitat conservation plan.” Prosecutions aren't common, because evidence can be elusive, but what Bean calls “the cloud of uncertainty” surrounding what landowners can and cannot do can be distressing.

Requirements the ESA places on federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management—or on the TVA—can have large economic impacts. Section 7 of the act prohibits agencies from taking, permitting or funding any action that is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of a listed species. If jeopardy seems possible, the agency must consult with the FWS first (or the National Marine Fisheries Service for marine species) and seek alternative plans.

“When people talk about how the ESA stops projects, they've been talking about section 7,” says conservation biologist Jacob Malcom. The Northern Spotted Owl is a strong example: an economic analysis suggests the logging restrictions eliminated thousands of timber-industry jobs, fueling conservative arguments that the ESA harms humans and economic growth.

In recent decades, however, that view has been based “on anecdote, not evidence,” Malcom claims. At Defenders of Wildlife, where he worked until 2022 (he's now at the U.S. Department of the Interior), he and his colleagues analyzed 88,290 consultations between the FWS and other agencies from 2008 to 2015. “Zero projects were stopped,” Malcom says. His group also found that federal agencies were only rarely taking the active measures to recover a species that section 7 requires—like what the TVA did for the Snail Darter. For many listed species, the FWS does not even have recovery plans.

Endangered species also might not recover because “most species are not receiving protection until they have reached dangerously low population sizes,” according to a 2022 study by Erich K. Eberhard of Columbia University and his colleagues. Most listings occur only after the FWS has been petitioned or sued by an environmental group—often the Center for Biological Diversity, which claims credit for 742 listings. Years may go by between petition and listing, during which time the species' population dwindles. Noah Greenwald, the center's endangered species director, thinks the FWS avoids listings to avoid controversy—that it has internalized opposition to the ESA.

He and other experts also say that work regarding endangered species is drastically underfunded. As more species are listed, the funding per species declines. “Congress hasn't come to grips with the biodiversity crisis,” says Baier, who lobbies lawmakers regularly. “When you talk to them about biodiversity, their eyes glaze over.” Just this year federal lawmakers enacted a special provision exempting the Mountain Valley Pipeline from the ESA and other challenges, much as Congress had exempted the Tellico Dam. Environmentalists say the gas pipeline, running from West Virginia to Virginia, threatens the Candy Darter, a colorful small fish. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided a rare bit of good news: it granted the FWS $62.5 million to hire more biologists to prepare recovery plans.

The ESA is often likened to an emergency room for species: overcrowded and understaffed, it has somehow managed to keep patients alive, but it doesn't do much more. The law contains no mandate to restore ecosystems to health even though it recognizes such work as essential for thriving wildlife. “Its goal is to make things better, but its tools are designed to keep things from getting worse,” Bean says. Its ability to do even that will be severely tested in coming decades by threats it was never designed to confront.

T he ESA requires a species to be listed as “threatened” if it might be in danger of extinction in the “foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future will be warmer. Rising average temperatures are a problem, but higher heat extremes are a bigger threat, according to a 2020 study.

Scientists have named climate change as the main cause of only a few extinctions worldwide. But experts expect that number to surge. Climate change has been “a factor in almost every species we've listed in at least the past 15 years,” Frazer says. Yet scientists struggle to forecast whether individual species can “persist in place or shift in space”—as Stein and his co-authors put it in a recent paper—or will be unable to adapt at all and will go extinct. On June 30 the FWS issued a new rule that will make it easier to move species outside their historical range—a practice it once forbade except in extreme circumstances.

Credit: June Minju Kim ( graphic ); Brown Bird Design ( illustrations ); Sources: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental Conservation Online System; U.S. Federal Endangered and Threatened Species by Calendar Year https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-listings-by-year-totals ( annual data through 2022 ); Listed Species Summary (Boxscore) https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/boxscore ( cumulative data up to September 18, 2023, and annual data for coral ); Delisted Species https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/report/species-delisted ( delisted data through 2022 )

Eventually, though, “climate change is going to swamp the ESA,” says J. B. Ruhl, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been writing about the problem for decades. “As more and more species are threatened, I don't know what the agency does with that.” To offer a practical answer, in a 2008 paper he urged the FWS to aggressively identify the species most at risk and not waste resources on ones that seem sure to expire.

Yet when I asked Frazer which urgent issues were commanding his attention right now, his first thought wasn't climate; it was renewable energy. “Renewable energy is going to leave a big footprint on the planet and on our country,” he says, some of it threatening plants and animals if not implemented well. “The Inflation Reduction Act is going to lead to an explosion of more wind and solar across the landscape.

Long before President Joe Biden signed that landmark law, conflicts were proliferating: Desert Tortoise versus solar farms in the Mojave Desert, Golden Eagles versus wind farms in Wyoming, Tiehm's Buckwheat (a little desert flower) versus lithium mining in Nevada. The mine case is a close parallel to that of Snail Darters versus the Tellico Dam. The flower, listed as endangered just last year, grows on only a few acres of mountainside in western Nevada, right where a mining company wants to extract lithium. The Center for Biological Diversity has led the fight to save it. Elsewhere in Nevada people have used the ESA to stop, for the moment, a proposed geothermal plant that might threaten the two-inch Dixie Valley Toad, discovered in 2017 and also declared endangered last year.

Does an absolute duty to preserve all endangered species make sense in such places? In a recent essay entitled “A Time for Triage,” Columbia law professor Michael Gerrard argues that “the environmental community has trade-off denial. We don't recognize that it's too late to preserve everything we consider precious.” In his view, given the urgency of building the infrastructure to fight climate change, we need to be willing to let a species go after we've done our best to save it. Environmental lawyers adept at challenging fossil-fuel projects, using the ESA and other statutes, should consider holding their fire against renewable installations. “Just because you have bullets doesn't mean you shoot them in every direction,” Gerrard says. “You pick your targets.” In the long run, he and others argue, climate change poses a bigger threat to wildlife than wind turbines and solar farms do.

For now habitat loss remains the overwhelming threat. What's truly needed to preserve the U.S.'s wondrous biodiversity, both Stein and Ruhl say, is a national network of conserved ecosystems. That won't be built with our present politics. But two more practical initiatives might help.

The first is the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, which narrowly missed passage in 2022 and has been reintroduced this year. It builds on the success of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, which funds state wildlife agencies through a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition. That law was adopted to address a decline in game species that had hunters alarmed. The state refuges and other programs it funded are why deer, ducks and Wild Turkeys are no longer scarce.

The recovery act would provide $1.3 billion a year to states and nearly $100 million to Native American tribes to conserve nongame species. It has bipartisan support, in part, Stein says, because it would help arrest the decline of a species before the ESA's “regulatory hammer” falls. Although it would be a large boost to state wildlife budgets, the funding would be a rounding error in federal spending. But last year Congress couldn't agree on how to pay for the measure. Passage “would be a really big deal for nature,” Curry says.

Oyster Mussel. Epioblasma capsaeformis.  Listed as Endangered: 1997. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The second initiative that could promote species conservation is already underway: bringing landowners into the fold. Most wildlife habitat east of the Rocky Mountains is on private land. That's also where habitat loss is happening fastest. Some experts say conservation isn't likely to succeed unless the FWS works more collaboratively with landowners, adding carrots to the ESA's regulatory stick. Bean has long promoted the idea, including when he worked at the Interior Department from 2009 to early 2017. The approach started, he says, with the Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

When the ESA was passed, there were fewer than 10,000 Red-cockaded Woodpeckers left of the millions that had once lived in the Southeast. Humans had cut down the old pine trees, chiefly Longleaf Pine, that the birds excavate cavities in for roosting and nesting. An appropriate tree has to be large, at least 60 to 80 years old, and there aren't many like that left. The longleaf forest, which once carpeted up to 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas, has been reduced to less than three million acres of fragments.

In the 1980s the ESA wasn't helping because it provided little incentive to preserve forest on private land. In fact, Bean says, it did the opposite: landowners would sometimes clear-cut potential woodpecker habitat just to avoid the law's constraints. The woodpecker population continued to drop until the 1990s. That's when Bean and his Environmental Defense Fund colleagues persuaded the FWS to adopt “safe-harbor agreements” as a simple solution. An agreement promised landowners that if they let pines grow older or took other woodpecker-friendly measures, they wouldn't be punished; they remained free to decide later to cut the forest back to the baseline condition it had been in when the agreement was signed.

That modest carrot was inducement enough to quiet the chainsaws in some places. “The downward trends have been reversed,” Bean says. “In places like South Carolina, where they have literally hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned forest enrolled, Red-cockaded Woodpecker numbers have shot up dramatically.”

The woodpecker is still endangered. It still needs help. Because there aren't enough old pines, land managers are inserting lined, artificial cavities into younger trees and sometimes moving birds into them to expand the population. They are also using prescribed fires or power tools to keep the longleaf understory open and grassy, the way fires set by lightning or Indigenous people once kept it and the way the woodpeckers like it. Most of this work is taking place, and most Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are still living, on state or federal land such as military bases. But a lot more longleaf must be restored to get the birds delisted, which means collaborating with private landowners, who own 80 percent of the habitat.

Leo Miranda-Castro, who retired last December as director of the FWS's southeast region, says the collaborative approach took hold at regional headquarters in Atlanta in 2010. The Center for Biological Diversity had dropped a “mega petition” demanding that the FWS consider 404 new species for listing. The volume would have been “overwhelming,” Miranda-Castro says. “That's when we decided, ‘Hey, we cannot do this in the traditional way.’ The fear of listing so many species was a catalyst” to look for cases where conservation work might make a listing unnecessary.

An agreement affecting the Gopher Tortoise shows what is possible. Like the woodpeckers, it is adapted to open-canopied longleaf forests, where it basks in the sun, feeds on herbaceous plants and digs deep burrows in the sandy soil. The tortoise is a keystone species: more than 300 other animals, including snakes, foxes and skunks, shelter in its burrows. But its numbers have been declining for decades.

Urbanization is the main threat to the tortoises, but timberland can be managed in a way that leaves room for them. Eager to keep the species off the list, timber companies, which own 20 million acres in its range, agreed to figure out how to do that—above all by returning fire to the landscape and keeping the canopy open. One timber company, Resource Management Service, said it would restore Longleaf Pine on about 3,700 acres in the Florida panhandle, perhaps expanding to 200,000 acres eventually. It even offered to bring other endangered species onto its land, which delighted Miranda-Castro: “I had never heard about that happening before.” Last fall the FWS announced that the tortoise didn't need to be listed in most of its range.

Miranda-Castro now directs Conservation Without Conflict, an organization that seeks to foster conversation and negotiation in settings where the ESA has more often generated litigation. “For the first 50 years the stick has been used the most,” Miranda-Castro says. “For the next 50 years we're going to be using the carrots way more.” On his own farm outside Fort Moore, Ga., he grows Longleaf Pine—and Gopher Tortoises are benefiting.

Whooping Crane. Grus americana.  Listed as Endangered: 1967. Status: Still endangered. Credit: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

The Center for Biological Diversity doubts that carrots alone will save the reptile. It points out that the FWS's own models show small subpopulations vanishing over the next few decades and the total population falling by nearly a third. In August 2023 it filed suit against the FWS, demanding the Gopher Tortoise be listed.

The FWS itself resorted to the stick this year when it listed the Lesser Prairie-Chicken, a bird whose grassland home in the Southern Plains has long been encroached on by agriculture and the energy industry. The Senate promptly voted to overturn that listing, but President Biden promised to veto that measure if it passes the House.

B ehind the debates over strategy lurks the vexing question: Can we save all species? The answer is no. Extinctions will keep happening. In 2021 the FWS proposed to delist 23 more species—not because they had recovered but because they hadn't been seen in decades and were presumed gone. There is a difference, though, between acknowledging the reality of extinction and deliberately deciding to let a species go. Some people are willing to do the latter; others are not. Bean thinks a person's view has a lot to do with how much they've been exposed to wildlife, especially as a child.

Zygmunt Plater, a professor emeritus at Boston College Law School, was the attorney in the 1978 Snail Darter case, fighting for hundreds of farmers whose land would be submerged by the Tellico Dam. At one point in the proceedings Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., asked him, “What purpose is served, if any, by these little darters? Are they used for food?” Plater thinks creatures such as the darter alert us to the threat our actions pose to them and to ourselves. They prompt us to consider alternatives.

The ESA aims to save species, but for that to happen, ecosystems have to be preserved. Protecting the Northern Spotted Owl has saved at least a small fraction of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. Concern about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Gopher Tortoise is aiding the preservation of longleaf forests in the Southeast. The Snail Darter wasn't enough to stop the Tellico Dam, which drowned historic Cherokee sites and 300 farms, mostly for real estate development. But after the controversy, the presence of a couple of endangered mussels did help dissuade the TVA from completing yet another dam, on the Duck River in central Tennessee. That river is now recognized as one of the most biodiverse in North America.

The ESA forced states to take stock of the wildlife they harbored, says Jim Williams, who as a young biologist with the FWS was responsible for listing both the Snail Darter and mussels in the Duck River. Williams grew up in Alabama, where I live. “We didn't know what the hell we had,” he says. “People started looking around and found all sorts of new species.” Many were mussels and little fish. In a 2002 survey, Stein found that Alabama ranked fifth among U.S. states in species diversity. It also ranks second-highest for extinctions; of the 23 extinct species the FWS recently proposed for delisting, eight were mussels, and seven of those were found in Alabama.

One morning this past spring, at a cabin on the banks of Shoal Creek in northern Alabama, I attended a kind of jamboree of local freshwater biologists. At the center of the action, in the shade of a second-floor deck, sat Sartore. He had come to board more species onto his photo ark, and the biologists—most of them from the TVA—were only too glad to help, fanning out to collect critters to be decanted into Sartore's narrow, flood-lit aquarium. He sat hunched before it, a black cloth draped over his head and camera, snapping away like a fashion photographer, occasionally directing whoever was available to prod whatever animal was in the tank into a more artful pose.

As I watched, he photographed a striated darter that didn't yet have a name, a Yellow Bass, an Orangefin Shiner and a giant crayfish discovered in 2011 in the very creek we were at. Sartore's goal is to help people who never meet such creatures feel the weight of extinction—and to have a worthy remembrance of the animals if they do vanish from Earth.

With TVA biologist Todd Amacker, I walked down to the creek and sat on the bank. Amacker is a mussel specialist, following in Williams's footsteps. As his colleagues waded in the shoals with nets, he gave me a quick primer on mussel reproduction. Their peculiar antics made me care even more about their survival.

There are hundreds of freshwater mussel species, Amacker explained, and almost every one tricks a particular species of fish into raising its larvae. The Wavy-rayed Lampmussel, for example, extrudes part of its flesh in the shape of a minnow to lure black bass—and then squirts larvae into the bass's open mouth so they can latch on to its gills and fatten on its blood. Another mussel dangles its larvae at the end of a yard-long fishing line of mucus. The Duck River Darter Snapper—a member of a genus that has already lost most of its species to extinction—lures and then clamps its shell shut on the head of a hapless fish, inoculating it with larvae. “You can't make this up,” Amacker said. Each relationship has evolved over the ages in a particular place.

The small band of biologists who are trying to cultivate the endangered mussels in labs must figure out which fish a particular mussel needs. It's the type of tedious trial-and-error work conservation biologists call “heroic,” the kind that helped to save California Condors and Whooping Cranes. Except these mussels are eyeless, brainless, little brown creatures that few people have ever heard of.

For most mussels, conditions are better now than half a century ago, Amacker said. But some are so rare it's hard to imagine they can be saved. I asked Amacker whether it was worth the effort or whether we just need to accept that we must let some species go. The catch in his voice almost made me regret the question.

“I'm not going to tell you it's not worth the effort,” he said. “It's more that there's no hope for them.” He paused, then collected himself. “Who are we to be the ones responsible for letting a species die?” he went on. “They've been around so long. That's not my answer as a biologist; that's my answer as a human. Who are we to make it happen?”

Robert Kunzig is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala., and a former senior editor at National Geographic, Discover and Scientific American .

News from the Columbia Climate School

Why Endangered Species Matter

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was established in 1973 to protect “imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend” and help them recover.

The Trump administration has put forth a number of proposals that would weaken the ESA. These include measures to allow for the consideration of economic impacts when enforcing the ESA, ending the practice of automatically giving threatened species the same protection as endangered species, and making it easier to remove species from the endangered list.

In a way, this is nothing new because the ESA has been under attack for decades from construction, development, logging, water management, fossil fuel extraction and other industries that contend the act stifles economic development. But between 2016 and 2018 alone, there were almost 150 attempts to undercut the ESA; and last year, from July 8 to 22, Republicans in Congress or the Trump administration introduced 24 such measures and spending bill riders.

These bills included efforts to remove the gray wolf’s protected status in Wyoming and the western Great Lakes; a plan to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle that lives on oil-rich land; and a strategy to roll back protection of the sage-grouse, which also inhabits oil-rich land in the West and whose numbers have declined 90 percent since the West was first settled. The Trump Administration recently opened up nine million acres of sage-grouse habitat to drilling and mining.

Endangered species, if not protected, could eventually become extinct—and extinction has a myriad of implications for our food, water, environment and even health.

Extinction rates are accelerating

Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct over the course of five mass extinctions, which, in the past, were largely a result of natural causes such as volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts. Today, the rate of extinction is occurring 1,000 to 10,000 times faster because of human activity. The main modern causes of extinction are the loss and degradation of habitat (mainly deforestation), over exploitation (hunting, overfishing), invasive species, climate change, and nitrogen pollution.

There are also other threats to species such as the pervasive plastic pollution in the ocean—a recent study found that 100 percent of sea turtles had plastic or microplastic in their systems.

Emerging diseases affecting more and more wildlife species such as bats, frogs and salamanders are the result of an increase in travel and trade, which allows pests and pathogens to hitch rides to new locations, and warming temperatures that enable more pests to survive and spread. Wildlife trafficking also continues to be a big problem because for some species, the fewer members there are, the more valuable they become to poachers and hunters.

How many species are endangered?

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species , over 26,500 species are in danger of extinction. This includes 40 percent of amphibians, 34 percent of conifers, 33 percent of reef-building corals , 25 percent of mammals and 14 percent of birds. In the U.S., over 1,600 species are listed as threatened or endangered.

A 2018 report by the Endangered Species Coalition found that ten species in particular are “imperiled” by the Trump administration’s proposals: California condor, giraffe, Hellbender salamander, Humboldt marten, leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, red wolf, rusty patched bumble bee,

San Bernardino kangaroo rat, West Indian manatee, and Western yellow-billed cuckoo.

The web of life

While it may seem unimportant if we lose one salamander or rat species, it matters because all species are connected through their interactions in a web of life. A balanced and biodiverse ecosystem is one in which each species plays an important role and relies on the services provided by other species to survive. Healthy ecosystems are more productive and resistant to disruptions.

A recent study found that extreme environmental change could trigger an “extinction domino effect.” One of the study’s authors said, “Because all species are connected in the web of life, our paper demonstrates that even the most tolerant species ultimately succumb to extinction when the less-tolerant species on which they depend disappear.” So saving one species means saving its habitat and the other species that live there too.

“When you lose one species, it affects the ecosystem and everything around it gets a little bit more fragile while it adapts to change,” said Kelsey Wooddell , assistant director of the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability. “Even if it’s not a keystone species [a species that others in an ecosystem depend on], its loss will weaken the functionality of the entire ecosystem, which just makes it easier for that ecosystem to stop working.”

What are the consequences of extinction?

Altering ecosystems through cascading effects

If a species has a unique function in its ecosystem, its loss can prompt cascading effects through the food chain (a “trophic cascade”), impacting other species and the ecosystem itself.

An often-cited example is the impact of the wolves in Yellowstone Park, which were hunted to near extinction by 1930. Without them, the elk and deer they had preyed upon thrived, and their grazing decimated streamside willows and aspens, which had provided habitat for songbirds. This left the stream banks susceptible to erosion, and a decline in songbirds allowed mosquitoes and other insects the birds would have eaten to multiply. When the wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995, they once again preyed on the elk; plant life returned to the stream banks and along with it, birds, beavers, fish and other animals. (Note: David Bernhardt, acting secretary of the Department of the Interior, just announced a proposal to strip gray wolves of their endangered status in the Lower 48 states.)

Kelp forests are another classic example. They play an important role in coastal ecosystems because they provide habitat for other species, protect the coastline from storm surges and absorb carbon dioxide.

Yet kelp forests are rapidly getting mowed down by exploding numbers of purple sea urchin. California sea otters eat the purple sea urchins that feed on giant kelp. These otters used to number in the hundreds of thousands to millions, but their population has been reduced to about 3,000 as a result of unchecked hunting in the 19th century and pollution. Moreover, in 2013 the sunflower starfish, which also eats purple sea urchins, began dying because of a virus that was likely exacerbated by warmer waters. Without the sea otter and the sunflower starfish predators, the purple sea urchin began feasting on the kelp forests, which declined 93 percent between 2013 and 2018. (A new study   found that kelp forests are now also threatened by ocean heat waves.) The explosion of sea urchins not only damaged the kelp ecosystem, it also had serious impacts on Northern California’s red urchins that are valued for sushi. Fish that need the kelp forests for spawning, such as sculpin, rock cod and red snapper may become vulnerable in the future as well.

As another example, Wooddell explained that on Guam, after the invasive brown tree snake was accidentally introduced to the island in the 1950s, 10 of the island’s 12 endemic bird species went extinct. “Typically birds eat seeds and spread seeds elsewhere on the island but that is no longer a functioning ecosystem,” she said. “So the forest and the trees have decreased a lot. And Guam is covered in spiders because the birds are not there to eat them.”

Losing apex species has multiple effects

Eliminating the large predators at the top of the food chain, the “apex species,” may be humans’ most serious impact on nature, according to one study . These large species are more vulnerable because they live longer, reproduce more slowly, have small populations, and need more food and a greater habitat area. Scientists say their loss has played a role in pandemics, fires, the decline of valued species and the rise of invasive ones, the reduction of ecosystem services, and decreased carbon sequestration.

Elephants are an apex species that may go extinct in our lifetime, as a result of tourism, habitat loss and poaching for ivory. This could dramatically change ecosystems in Africa and Asia. Through consumption and digestion, elephants disperse more seeds farther than any other animals; this fosters the growth of plants and trees that birds, bats and other animals depend upon for food and shelter.

Elephants also dig water holes that all animals share, and they fertilize the soil with their rich dung, which provides food for other animals.

The loss of apex species can also affect wildfires. After rinderpest, an infectious virus, wiped out many plant-eating wildebeest and buffalo in East Africa in the late 1800s, plants flourished. During the dry season, this over-abundance of vegetation spurred an increase in wildfires. In the 1960s, after rinderpest was eliminated through vaccinations, the wildebeest and buffalo returned. The ecosystem went from shrubbery to grasslands again, decreasing the amount of combustible vegetation, and the wildfires decreased.

Jeopardizing pollination

Seventy-five percent of the world’s food crops are partially or completely pollinated by insects and other animals, and practically all flowering plants in the tropical rainforest are pollinated by animals. The loss of pollinators could result in a decrease in seed and fruit production, leading ultimately to the extinction of many important plants.

Flying foxes, also known as fruit bats, are the only pollinators of some rainforest plants. They have been over-hunted in tropical forests with several species going extinct. One study noted that 289 plant species, including eucalyptus and agave, rely on flying foxes to reproduce; in turn, these plants were responsible for producing 448 valuable products.

Bees pollinate over 250,000 species of plants, including most of the 87 crops that humans rely on for food, such as almonds, apples and cucumbers.

But in recent years, large populations of bees have been wiped out by the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” wherein adult honeybees disappear from their hive, likely in response to numerous stressors.

Over the last 20 years in the U.S., monarch butterflies, which pollinate many wildflowers, have decreased 90 percent. The rusty-patched bumble bee, another important pollinator and the first bee species to be put on the endangered list, now only occupies one percent of its former range.

Insect populations overall are declining due to climate change, habitat degradation, herbicides and pesticides. A 2014 review of insect studies found that most monitored species had decreased by about 45 percent. And a German study  found 75 percent fewer flying insects after just 27 years. As insect populations are reduced, the small animals, fish and birds that rely on them for food are being affected, and eventually the predators of fish and birds will feel the impacts as well. One entomologist who had studied insects in the rainforest in the 1970s returned in 2010 to find an up to 60-fold reduction. His study reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.”

Endangering the food chain

Plankton, tiny plant and animal organisms that live in the ocean or fresh water, make up the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton are critical to the health of oceans and the planet because they consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen during photosynthesis.

In 2010, researchers found that phytoplankton had decreased 40 percent globally since 1950, and attributed the decline to rising sea surface temperatures. The scientists speculated that the warming surface waters did not mix well with the cooler, deeper waters rich in nutrients that phytoplankton need. In addition, zooplankton are very sensitive to slight changes in the amount of oxygen in the ocean, and may be unable to adapt as areas of low oxygen expand due to climate change.

The quantity and quality of plankton also affects the nutrition of other creatures further up the food chain. In the Mediterranean Sea, the biomass of sardines and anchovies declined by one-third in just ten years. One scientist speculated that this is because the sardines’ and anchovies’ normal plankton had disappeared, so they had to resort to eating a less nutritious species of plankton with fewer calories. Changes in plankton quality could be a result of water temperature, pollution or lack of nutrients, but scientists are not exactly sure why the plankton makeup in some places is changing. If it is due to global warming and pollution, some say the situation could worsen.

However, Sonya Dyhrman, a professor in Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences who studies phytoplankton with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is more sanguine about the future. “Microbes like phytoplankton can adapt, can acclimate, and can evolve, so I worry less about lineages of phytoplankton going extinct and more about how phytoplankton community composition will change in the future ocean,” said Dyhrman.

A different community composition of phytoplankton could change the food web structure, but Dyhrman is not really worried about the total collapse of fisheries. She is concerned, however, that “there could be changes in ocean ecosystems and we don’t really know what those changes will be. What will the architecture of that ecosystem look like in the future? The problem is, the ocean is already changing and we don’t understand the architecture of the ecosystem right now well enough to predict what will happen in the future.“

Losing nature’s therapeutic riches

More than a quarter of prescription medications contain chemicals that were discovered through plants or animals. Penicillin was derived from a fungus. Scientists are studying the venom of some tarantulas to see if one of its compounds could help cure diseases such as Parkinson’s. One molecule from a rare marine bacterium could be the basis of a new way to treat to melanoma.

Scientists have so far identified about 1.7 million different types of organisms, but between 10 and 50 million species are thought to exist on Earth.

Who knows what substances or capabilities some of these species might possess that could help treat diseases and make human lives easier?

Destroying livelihoods

According to a study for the U.N., the continued loss of species could cost the world 18 percent of global economic output by 2050.

Already, a number of industries have been economically impacted by species loss. The collapse of bee populations has hurt many in the $50 billion-a-year global honey industry. Atlantic cod in the waters off of Newfoundland formed the basis of the local economy since the 15 th century — until overfishing the cod destroyed the livelihoods of local fishermen.

What you can do about extinction

Extinction is hard to see. We may not realize how much of the natural world has been lost because the “baseline” shifts with every generation. Past generations would regard what we see as natural today as terribly damaged, and what we see as damaged today, our children will view as natural.

Wooddell believes the most important thing one can do is to put pressure on Congress and elected leaders to create land management, pollution and other sustainable policies that will protect biodiversity and the environment. However, because it’s unlikely that these kinds of top-down policies will be instituted in the current political climate, she recommends mobilizing grassroots community groups to create “bottom-up” policies.

Here are some other things you can do to protect endangered species and prevent extinction:

• Eat less meat. Soybean production is one of the main causes of deforestation, and most soybean meal is used for animal feed.
• Buy organic food because organic farmers use only non-synthetic or natural pesticides on their crops. Synthetic pesticides may be toxic for other organisms.
• Choose sustainable seafood. The Marine Stewardship Council provides a list of certified sustainable fish for responsible eating.
• Compost food waste . In New York City, the compost is used for urban farming and gardening, which provide habitat for pollinators.
• Buy wood and paper products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council , to ensure they’re harvested from responsibly managed forests.

• Don’t buy products made from endangered or threatened species, such as tortoise shell, ivory, coral, some animal skins, and “traditional” medicines.
• Be aware of the source of palm oil used in countless food and cosmetic products. Many tropical forests are being razed for palm oil plantations. If a product contains palm oil, make sure it’s from a deforestation-free plantation .
• Reduce your use of plastic .
• If you have a garden, plant native shrubs and flowers that attract butterflies and other pollinators. Milkweed is particularly helpful for monarch butterflies.
• Set up a beehive.
• Diversify your diet. Eating these 50 foods will promote biodiversity and a healthier plant.
• Support and get involved with organizations that are helping endangered animals.
• Join the Center for Biological Diversity and use their Take-Action Toolboxes.

Correction: This post was updated on April 3, 2019 to remove a sentence about cownose rays devastating scallop populations off of North Carolina. It turns out that other studies have challenged those findings. 

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Columbia Climate School has once again been selected as university partner for Climate Week NYC, an annual convening of climate leaders to drive the transition, speed up progress and champion change. Join us for events and follow our coverage .

A new UN report ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html ) finds that one million species are at risk of extinction; this is threatening ecosystems around the world that human beings need to survive.

The Trump administration has put forth new rules that will significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html?module=inline

Wouldn’t there be an evolutionary development that occurs when one species is gone? What happened when something like the Dodo went extinct? Did other creatures in its ecosystems adapt to perform the Dodo’s services? When I think about extinction, I always wonder what would have happened if the dinosaurs had not become extinct.

I am late to the discussion about keystone species but since I have learned about the roles of these key animals to specific environments around the world I have tried and failed to see homo sapiens as a keystone species but rather I see us more like the ungulates, which when left unchecked by a corresponding predator, such as the wolf in the Yellow Stone Park scenario, would decimate any environment we occupy. We are overpopulating, over consuming, over producing items that are harmful to the entire world (such as plastics) and what will keep us in check? Who will be our wolves? Cancer? Illnesses? Violence? If humans disappeared from the earth, just suddenly vanished, I think the earth and all her flora and fauna would recover quickly. Our intelligence should curb our avarice, but I fear we are too shortsighted and too quick to rationalize away the science which spells out the looming disaster brought on my our ignorance and greed.

Dear Deborah, Your analysis is very disturbing; and unfortunately, true. Nice post, keep it up.

well said. I think this is spot on and with the human species looking to colonize Mars and the Moon…what more damage will we do?

Endangered species are important. In my opinion, their absence can cause a break in the food chain or break synergies with other species, and thus a negative impact on them. One species and can change so much. Like a domino effect. We should take care of every species.

I have been searching for a reasonable explanation of preservation of endangered species, and the search continues still. Apart from few redundant examples like bees or birds/animals taking part in pollinating processes or overgrowth/extinction, I can’t see any direct explanation on the outcomes of the extinctions of any species, viz. Tigers, Elephants, Rhinos, Deers etc. on the ecosystems or direct influence on humankind. Whereas, deforestation, excessive usage of fossil fuels, phytoplankton extinctions leading to global warming effects are easily understood, no such wide range of explanations and outcomes do exist on the extinction of species and their wide range of influences. Still looking for a reasonable explanation….

can effect the food chain and thus effect humans less tigers mean more prey and then they will take up resources and could become extinct and so on

I love animals!

same, i hope we can work together to stop some animals from going extinct.

Endangered Animals Matter Because If They Disappear, It Could Destroy Entire Ecosystems, STEA ( Save The Endangered Animals )

Yes, absolutely!

the thought of someone killing a poor turtle to make a stupid mirror just makes me want to cry! how could people be so cruel!?!?!?

That’s the sad world we live in.

I LOVE ANIMALS WE LOVE ANIMALS.HELP ANIMALS!

That is a wild amount of money that bees are responsible for pollinating crops.

I can’t believe that how many animals have gone extinct

I know right, it is so sad

I agree, without animals there would be no cures for horrible and possibly deadly diseases. Who knew that most of our endangered species helped with cures.

Why do they endanger species this makes me mad

We should save them, not hunt them. I hate the trump administration

I agree entirely.

I wish all animals would live without the fear of extinction.

I wish there was a way we could stop the cause of extinction and make a way to where more people would actually care.

How do i cite this?

how do i cite this

This is so wonderful. It has lots of info. I absolutely love this site!

This is such a great article with a great display of information!

yo i think we should get alot of people to explore the water and to save animals to pick up trash too.

bruh can they delete the trash out of the ocean using robots or elon musk can do somthing

At this point I don’t think anyone can take on a task that big

I don’t want any more animals to go extinct

Hi there! I just read the article on https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/03/26/endangered-species-matter and I found it informative. I appreciate how the author broke down complex ideas in a way that was easy to understand. It’s great to see content that is both engaging and educational. Thanks for sharing this resource!

Good resource, and lots of imformation

I went to Alley Springs and saw the scenery and now I run a business where I sell eco-friendly things and do manual labor to help trees. All the money is put to help forests and animals. -Evalyn Demery

Thats a good idea!

I think an easier way to clean out our ocean is to just volunteer and stop having robots or people that act like they do but don’t really care doing it

Great Article!!

HELP ANIMALS

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Fighting Extinction: Researching and Designing Solutions to Protect Endangered Species

By Sara Rust

• Oct. 19, 2017

The African wild dog. The Asian elephant. The Eastern lowland gorilla. These are just three of the many vertebrate species facing possible extinction because of human activities. Is there anything we can do to protect endangered species, and slow overall extinction rates?

In this lesson, students use Times reporting to learn about how human activity threatens the Earth’s biodiversity, and they research possible solutions that weigh environmental, economic and social concerns. As a Going Further activity, we invite students to act as citizen scientists addressing the problem in their own communities.

This lesson addresses the Next Generation High School Life Sciences Standard on Ecosystems, particularly HS-LS2-7 , which asks students to design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.

One possible entry point to this discussion is through the vivid, often disturbing pictures in the photo essay “ A Mausoleum for Endangered Species .” You could select one image to show students, or give students access to the full text, and ask them to:

• Describe what you see. • Describe your reaction to seeing these images. • Address: What questions do these images raise for you?

Then hold a brief discussion in small groups or as a class.

Background Reading and Questions

Students can then develop a preliminary understanding of the issue of endangered and extinct species by reading the article “ Era of ‘Biological Annihilation’ Is Underway, Scientists Warn .” After reading, ask them to first write in response to, and then discuss, the following questions:

1. The author writes, “Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in usually alarming tones for an academic research paper. ‘It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,’ he said.”

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Environmental Studies: Saving Endangered Species Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

There is no secret that in the present-day world, hundreds of species vanish from the face of the Earth completely due to the changes in their habitat. The latter, being spawned by the environmental changes inflicted by people’s activities, requires thorough research. One of the major concerns of the XXI century, the shrinkage of the Atlantic Forest, will inevitably trigger the disappearance of an even greater number of species populations.

To make the matters worse, some of the endangered species in question are nowhere else to be found except for the Atlantic Forest, which means that these animals and plants will be lost for good for the humankind (Mongillo & Zierdt-Warsaw, 2000). With the help of modern technologies, such as Google Earth, one can detect the source of the problem and, therefore, provide an efficient solution to it.

The procedure for acquiring the necessary data is relatively easy. By using the Google Earth Plug-in (Google Planet), one starts the program on the PC, either going to the 3-D model or remaining in the Google Earth view. Below is the image of Rio de Janeiro:

When reconsidering the evidence obtained via Google Earth, one must admit that the given method of acquiring information also has its flaws, the most basic one being the inability to locate the effects that the civilization has on nature. Google Earth shows the total area of the Atlantic Forest in a very graphic way:

The second picture shows that the deforested areas in Rio de Janeiro are increasing rapidly. For instance, the area used for growing coffee crops has shrunken considerably, which can be observed in the picture above. When speaking about deforested tropical areas, one must also mention the coast of Rio and its industrial regions:

In addition, it is relatively easy to spot the line drawn between the natural habitat and the environment created by people:

However, the effect of the latter on the Atlantic Forest is practically unnoticeable in Google Earth. One might argue, however, that by comparing the evidence obtained before the current evidence, one can spot the tendency in Atlantic Forest shrinkage.

According to the existing evidence, creating an artificial environment that will resemble the one in the Atlantic Forest is practically impossible. Due to the specifics of the local climate, as well as the environment, which every single element of a tropical rainforest, starting with a mosquito to the huge, centennial trees, contributes considerably to.

Therefore, the most reasonable solution to the given problem is not to create an artificial environment, but to restore and sustain the Atlantic Forest, making sure that each of its elements is in its place and that people have no effect on its fragile ecosystem.

One of the most efficient solutions for saving the Atlantic Forest species from dying out is to follow the principles of sustainability. Despite the considerable distance between the location and civilization of the rainforests, it is necessary to admit that people’s intrusion into the rainforest ecosystem occurs daily. One of the major problems concerning the relationship between people and nature in this regard is the process of cutting rainforests down.

On the one hand, the process of cutting trees down is inevitable – people need to use natural resources to create the environment in which they can live, i.e., build houses, create furniture and household appliances, not to mention people’s need in paper as one of the integral parts of people’s everyday life.

On the other hand, with the current technological advances, several rainforests could be saved if people used not only wood, but also other materials for furniture, paper, and other life essentials (Palo & Vanhanen, 2000). As the snapshots above show, the areas that used to be the realm of tropical rainforests have been replaced by blocks of flats, numerous hotels, and other buildings. While technological progress must be appreciated, it should not come at the cost of rainforests and the unique nature of the Atlantic Forest.

Considering the areas in question closer, one must admit that the number of rainforests in Rio is dropping quickly. It seems that the city makes almost 80% of the land, which used to be the place where rainforests grew.

Also, if comparing some of the images in the center of the city and some of its remote corners, one will inevitably find out that the amount of rainforests is narrowing down by at least 2% per year. The given phenomenon can be explained by the rapid process of urbanization and the tendency to occupy the entire area of the city with economically valuable objects, ie, offices, hotels, and houses for rent (Gay, 2001).

Therefore, it can be assumed that the endangered species can still be saved. By analyzing the situation with the help of the Google Earth software, one can make sure that the animals and plants inhabiting tropical rainforests will be safe. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that the tropical rainforests also need people’s care and protection from the impact of civilization. That being said, it can be assumed that the tropical life, though being under threat, still can be saved.

Reference List

Gay, K. (2001). Rainforests of the world: A reference book . Santa-Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Mongillo, J. F. & Zierdt-Warsaw, L. (2000). Encyclopedia of environmental science . Phoenix, AZ: The Oryx Press.

Palo, M. & Vanhanen, H. (2000). World forests: From deforestation to transition? Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

• Environmental Stewardship of Deforestation
• Natural Sciences: Organisms and Environmental Changes
• Brazil Rainforest: Threats to the Amazon Rainforests
• Tropical Rain Forest
• Deforestation and Its Man-Made Causes
• Banning Hosepipe Use as a Poor Solution to a Water Shortage
• Environmental Hazards in Working in a Nail Salon
• E-Waste Causes and Effects
• Hydraulic Fracking for Natural Gas Extraction in Pennsylvania
• Environmental Problem of the Ok Tedi Copper Mine
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Protecting Endangered Species

This essay will discuss the importance of protecting endangered species. It will cover the reasons species become endangered, including habitat loss, climate change, and human activities. The piece will examine conservation efforts and strategies to protect biodiversity, such as habitat restoration, legal protections, and wildlife conservation programs. It will also discuss the broader ecological implications of species extinction and the role of international cooperation in conservation. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Agriculture.

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At the beginning of 2018, researches have calculated 801 different types of animals that have gone completely extinct of which 65 of them are extinct in the wild. Researches have calculated about 3,879 different types of animals that are critically endangered. People say protecting endangered animals is a waste of money, time, and has no benefits for us but here is why we should protect endangered species. Protecting endangered species would help raise environmental awareness to protect and bring order. Being able to bring environmental awareness, could help protect the ecosystem and help restore the number of species that have been endangered over time.

Species being extinct can affect our ecosystem because of the duties each of them may have. For example, there can be a plant that can bring more oxygen than others, a fish that protects underwater organisms for medicine or even for food. The number of species being extinct up to date has increased tremendously. While species are being extinct, we could be missing out on the significance of medicine and cures that are yet to be discovered. If one plant species gets extinct, the possible aids such as medicine will be lost. While many plants may be approaching extinction without our knowledge, these plants could contain a huge number of important compounds that can extend the human lifespan or the cure for deadly diseases. Even though plants are not the only source of medicine, there are multiple animals that are medically used like a scorpion venom is used by researchers for a brain tumor or a viper’s venom to control blood pressure.  In today’s society, some medical practices use fish scales on burned victims to help cure faster and not acquire any infections during the healing process. Agriculture also plays an important role in the protection of species. Farmers are often seen as the original environmentalists because many of them set aside parts of their land as a wildlife habitat for endangered fish and reptiles.

Many species, like bees, contain important inherited material that is needed to maintain crops. With the genes that scientists gathered from the DNAs of plants, they are pest or disease resistance, salt tolerance, and drought-resistant. These relations can be used to guarantee new crops will develop in the future. The opposing argument as to why endangered species should not be protected is it will take more money to save them than to just move on and species endangerment is a part of life. Protecting species should not be about the amount of money being wasted but should come from having the knowledge of what each species role is and how it impacts our everyday life. As for being part of our life and it just being a life cycle, the majority of the endangered species are used for agriculture, ecosystem, and medical purpose that can help save a life. A plan that that would help protect the endangerment of species is to create strict laws and security. Many countries have laws but a lot of them have been broken because they lack enforcement. Researches have calculated about 3,879 different types of animal’s that are critically endangered while people say protecting endangered animals is a waste of money, time, and have no benefits for us. Protecting these species is beneficial to us for medical purposes, agriculture, which majority of our food comes from farms that are needing support from species and evolving the world.

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Endangered Species Essay Sample and Writing Guide

Have you ever thought that in the technological age people have almost forgotten about nature and the importance of protecting the natural environment? Unfortunately, it is a sad reality, but that is the truth we have to face. People do not really care that somewhere, far away from their comfortable homes, species of animals and plants are disappearing from our planet forever. And it is good that teachers at colleges and schools ask their students to write an endangered species essay. In this way they will make our youth aware of this problem. But, of course, the task of writing an endangered species essay is not an easy one. Here are some guidelines to help you with the task.

Endangered Species Essay: What to Write about

First of all, your task is to define what endangered species are.

You may say that these are organisms in the wild which once had a big population, but now their numbers are diminished and they are categorized as endangered species. The organisms which do not exist anymore on the planet are considered extinct. We need to do everything possible to prevent endangered species from becoming extinct.

Secondly, you may write about specific examples of endangered species. Here you can mention tigers, giant pandas, snow leopards, the komodo dragons, and others. For more endangered species look through the Internet websites –there is a lot of information on the topic.

It will be useful to talk about the reasons why animals and plants become endangered. For instance, one of the reasons is poaching. Poaching is a process of illegally killing rare animals for commercial benefits. As it is a criminal activity the animals can only be sold only on the Black Market. Nevertheless, this problem exists; governments and NGO’s have to do everything to stop this poaching.

The second reason is the loss of natural habitat. Every year new buildings encroach more and more on the animal’s wilderness territory, that’s why the forests are cut down; grasslands are being destroyed because of new highways and such. In these circumstances the wild animal species simply have no place to go. And even when they have somewhere to go, they cannot always resettle in a new habitat. As a result, they do not survive. The same applies to endangered plants. They are often stolen and sold or are destroyed when humans need more farm land. As this second reason is also caused by humans only we can do something to help nature. A paragraph dealing with some solutions would be appropriate here.

In your conclusion it would be great to emphasize people’s role in causing and solving the problem of endangered species.

Endangered Species Essay Sample

What Are the Natural Reasons for Endangered Species Disappearing?

The Earth has already witnessed five mass extinctions and is about to experience one more. More than 99 percent of total species, amounting to over five billion species that ever existed on Earth are estimated to be extinct (Gaston and Kunin). But why does it happen? What are natural reasons for the species to disappear? Usually, it is linked to habitat fragmentation and climate change. But there also are other hidden reasons underneath them.

There is one latent reason that lies in the bottom of animal and plant extinction and poses the single greatest threat to the biological diversity of our planet. Habitat fragmentation is destructive change to landscapes and environment that is caused either by natural phenomena, such as floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions, or human activities, such as deforestation, construction, artificial land drainage, and changing land use for agriculture. Despite the process, the natural environment of a species becomes diminished in total area size, broken up into several smaller patches or destroyed (Suzán et al.). If the habitat is reduced in size or divided into smaller pieces, it tends to support smaller populations of species, which poses an increased risk of a genetic diversity that influences long-term survival of the species. If the environment is demolished it forces inhabitants to flee from the territory, they adapted to for hundreds of years and migrated to a different environment. Such an intrusion into other species’ habitat often has disastrous consequences for local biota and leads to the arising of conflicts between local and migratory species (Suzán et al.). If they are not able to adapt to changes, one of them will be pushed towards extinction.planet.

Another cause of the extinction is climate change, which is the change in the distribution of average weather patterns, which can last for an extended period of time, like millions of years. Basically, the climate is the equilibrium of the energy our planet receives from the Sun, the density of the ozone layer which protects us from Sun’s ultraviolet radiation and concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, absorb and emit solar radiation within thermal infrared range, thus keeping the Earth warmer (“Climate Change Indicators: Greenhouse Gases”). In the last 650,000 years, Earth’s climate changed for seven times with the sudden end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago, that marked the modern climate era. Most of the factors that can change climate are variation in solar radiation, change in Earth’s orbit, depletion of the ozone layer and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. While the energy output of the Sun and rotation of our planet are unabated, the density of the ozone shield and greenhouse gas concentration are in limits of reach and humanity fails to maintain it. The depletion of the ozone layer is only caused by human-made chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halogenated ozone depleting substances and enables more UV to come through. The power of UV radiation affects the way plants form, timing the growth and development, metabolism, and distribution of plant nutrient, which important implications for plant competitive balance, animals that feed on these plants, plant diseases, and biogeochemical cycles. The power of higher UV radiation levels affects the natural balance of gases and greenhouse gases in the biosphere, like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and carbonyl sulfide (“Climate Change Indicators: Greenhouse Gases”). What is more, certain human activities, such as combustion of fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, and principally coal, along with animal agriculture, deforestation, and soil erosion produce an enormous amount of carbon dioxide (“Climate Change Indicators: Greenhouse Gases”). All this cause heat of the atmosphere, resulting in global warming that causes the world’s oceans to warm, as they absorb 80 percent of the additional heat, changes the global sea level.

Rising temperatures of the oceans directly affect the metabolism, behavior and life cycle of marine species. For various species, temperature serves as a signal for reproduction. Changes in sea temperature could have an impact on their successful breeding. For instance, the number of male and female offspring is determined by temperature for marine turtles, as well as some fish and copepods (“Climate Impacts On Ecosystems”). Changing climate could, therefore, skew sex proportions and threaten population survival. Rising temperatures in the oceans will also affect the development and population of the plankton which forms the basis of marine food chains and fixes about half the carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere. As the oceans become warmer, the location of the ideal water temperature may shift for many species, thus forcing them to migrate (“Climate Impacts On Ecosystems”).

Sea level has been growing over the past century, and the rate has risen in recent decades. The increase of the sea level is usually linked to two primary factors: the thermal expansion of seawater and the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers both as a result of the global temperature rise (“Climate Impacts On Coastal Areas”).

Increasing sea levels due to climate change may have a great influence on the coral reef ecosystem. The coral reef ecosystem is evolved to thrive within specific temperature and sea level range (“Climate Impacts On Ecosystems”). They live in a symbiotic association with photosynthetic zooxanthellae. Zooxanthellae needs the sunlight to produce the nutrients necessary for the coral. Rising sea levels may cause a decrease in solar radiation at the sea surface level, impairing the ability of photosynthetic zooxanthellae to synthesize nutrients for the coral, whereas, a sudden exposure of the coral reef to the atmosphere may cause coral bleaching due to a low tide event (“Climate Impacts On Ecosystems”).

The melting of the glaciers and ice sheets contributes to increasing the levels of the world’s oceans. It is affecting certain animal species at the North pole. One such species are the polar bears. They usually rely on the ice sheets that swarm on the Arctic sea to find their prey. Global warming is making the ice sheets to melt earlier every year, affecting the survival of the polar bears (Ma). Scientists have predicted that the polar bears will not survive an entire loss of sea-ice cover during the summer. They also estimated that the population of the polar bears is of a little more than 20,000 and that this number could decrease by the year 2050 (Ma).

It has been shown that the primary natural causes of the animal extinction are habitat fragmentation and climate change which include rising of the sea levels and melting ice sheets and glaciers. Despite the reason why the endangered species become extinct, it looks like it is somehow triggered by the human activities which we need to rethink to save our planet.

Works Cited

Gaston, Kevin, and William E. Kunin. The Biology of Rarity. Chapman and Hall, 1997. Suzán, Gerardo et al. “The Effect of Habitat Fragmentation and Species Diversity Loss on Hantavirus Prevalence in Panama.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1149, no. 1, 2008, pp. 80-83. Wiley-Blackwell, doi:10.1196/annals.1428.063. “Climate Change Indicators: Greenhouse Gases.” US EPA, 2017, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/greenhouse-gases. “Climate Impacts on Coastal Areas.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 6 Oct. 2016, www.19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-coastal-areas_.html. “Climate Impacts on Ecosystems.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 22 Dec. 2016, www.19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-ecosystems_.html. Ma, Michelle. “Polar Bears Across the Arctic Face Shorter Sea Ice Season.” Climate Change: Vital Signs Of The Planet, 2017, www.climate.nasa.gov/news/2499/polar-bears-across-the-arctic-face-shorter-sea-ice-season/.

Endangered Species Essay: Help

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Protecting endangered animal species.

Acknowledgments

Conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Li, C. Protecting Endangered Animal Species. Animals 2024 , 14 , 2644. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14182644

Li C. Protecting Endangered Animal Species. Animals . 2024; 14(18):2644. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14182644

Li, Chunwang. 2024. "Protecting Endangered Animal Species" Animals 14, no. 18: 2644. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14182644

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Endangered Species

An endangered species is a type of organism that is threatened by extinction. Species become endangered for two main reasons: loss of habitat and loss of genetic variation.

Biology, Ecology, Geography, Conservation

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An endangered species is a type of organism that is threatened by extinction . Species become endangered for two main reasons: loss of habitat and loss of genetic variation . Loss of Habitat A loss of habitat can happen naturally. Nonavian dinosaurs , for instance, lost their habitat about 65 million years ago. The hot, dry climate of the Cretaceous period changed very quickly, most likely because of an asteroid striking Earth. The impact of the asteroid forced debris into the atmosphere , reducing the amount of heat and light that reached Earth’s surface. The dinosaurs were unable to adapt to this new, cooler habitat. Nonavian dinosaurs became endangered, then extinct . Human activity can also contribute to a loss of habitat. Development for housing, industry , and agriculture reduces the habitat of native organisms. This can happen in a number of different ways. Development can eliminate habitat and native species directly. In the Amazon rainforest of South America, developers have cleared hundreds of thousands of acres. To “clear” a piece of land is to remove all trees and vegetation from it. The Amazon rainforest is cleared for cattle ranches , logging , and ur ban use. Development can also endanger species indirectly. Some species, such as fig trees of the rainforest, may provide habitat for other species. As trees are destroyed, species that depend on that tree habitat may also become endangered. Tree crowns provide habitat in the canopy , or top layer, of a rainforest . Plants such as vines, fungi such as mushrooms, and insects such as butterflies live in the rainforest canopy. So do hundreds of species of tropical birds and mammals such as monkeys. As trees are cut down, this habitat is lost. Species have less room to live and reproduce . Loss of habitat may happen as development takes place in a species range . Many animals have a range of hundreds of square kilometers. The mountain lion ( Puma concolor ) of North America, for instance, has a range of up to 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles). To successfully live and reproduce, a single mountain lion patrols this much territory. Urban areas , such as Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, grew rapidly during the 20th century. As these areas expanded into the wilderness, the mountain lion’s habitat became smaller. That means the habitat can support fewer mountain lions. Because enormous parts of the Sierra Nevada, Rocky, and Cascade mountain ranges remain undeveloped, however, mountain lions are not endangered. Loss of habitat can also lead to increased encounters between wild species and people. As development brings people deeper into a species range, they may have more exposure to wild species. Poisonous plants and fungi may grow closer to homes and schools. Wild animals are also spotted more frequently . These animals are simply patrolling their range, but interaction with people can be deadly. Polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ), mountain lions, and alligators are all predators brought into close contact with people as they lose their habitat to homes, farms , and businesses. As people kill these wild animals, through pesticides , accidents such as collisions with cars, or hunting, native species may become endangered.

Loss of Genetic Variation Genetic variation is the diversity found within a species. It’s why human beings may have blond, red, brown, or black hair. Genetic variation allows species to adapt to changes in the environment. Usually, the greater the population of a species, the greater its genetic variation. Inbreeding is reproduction with close family members. Groups of species that have a tendency to inbreed usually have little genetic variation, because no new genetic information is introduced to the group. Disease is much more common, and much more deadly, among inbred groups. Inbred species do not have the genetic variation to develop resistance to the disease. For this reason, fewer offspring of inbred groups survive to maturity. Loss of genetic variation can occur naturally. Cheetahs ( Acinonyx jubatus ) are a threatened species native to Africa and Asia. These big cats have very little genetic variation. Biologists say that during the last Ice Age , cheetahs went through a long period of inbreeding. As a result, there are very few genetic differences between cheetahs. They cannot adapt to changes in the environment as quickly as other animals, and fewer cheetahs survive to maturity. Cheetahs are also much more difficult to breed in captivity than other big cats, such as lions ( Panthera leo ). Human activity can also lead to a loss of genetic variation. Overhunting and overfishing have reduced the populations of many animals. Reduced population means there are fewer breeding pairs . A breeding pair is made up of two mature members of the species that are not closely related and can produce healthy offspring. With fewer breeding pairs, genetic variation shrinks. Monoculture , the agricultural method of growing a single crop , can also reduce genetic variation. Modern agribusiness relies on monocultures. Almost all potatoes cultivated , sold, and consumed, for instance, are from a single species, the Russet Burbank ( Solanum tuberosum ). Potatoes, native to the Andes Mountains of South America, have dozens of natural varieties. The genetic variation of wild potatoes allows them to adapt to climate change and disease. For Russet Burbanks, however, farmers must use fertilizers and pesticides to ensure healthy crops because the plant has almost no genetic variation. Plant breeders often go back to wild varieties to collect genes that will help cultivated plants resist pests and drought, and adapt to climate change. However, climate change is also threatening wild varieties. That means domesticated plants may lose an important source of traits that help them overcome new threats. The Red List The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) keeps a “Red List of Threatened Species.” The Red List de fines the severity and specific causes of a species’ threat of extinction. The Red List has seven levels of conservation: least concern , near threatened , vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered , extinct in the wild , and extinct. Each category represents a different threat level. Species that are not threatened by extinction are placed within the first two categories—least concern and near-threatened. Those that are most threatened are placed within the next three categories, known as the threatened categories —vulnerable, endangered, and critically endangered. Those species that are extinct in some form are placed within the last two categories—extinct in the wild and extinct. Classifying a species as endangered has to do with its range and habitat, as well as its actual population. For this reason, a species can be of least concern in one area and endangered in another. The gray whale ( Eschrichtius robustus ), for instance, has a healthy population in the eastern Pacific Ocean, along the coast of North and South America. The population in the western Pacific, however, is critically endangered.

Least Concern Least concern is the lowest level of conservation . A species of least concern is one that has a widespread and abundant population. Human beings are a species of least concern, along with most domestic animals , such as dogs ( Canis familiaris ) and cats ( Felis catus ). Many wild animals, such as pigeons and houseflies ( Musca domestica ), are also classified as least concern. Near Threatened A near threatened species is one that is likely to qualify for a threatened category in the near future. Many species of violets , native to tropical jungles in South America and Africa, are near threatened, for instance. They have healthy populations, but their rainforest habitat is disappearing at a fast pace. People are cutting down huge areas of rainforest for development and timber . Many violet species are likely to become threatened. Vulnerable Species The definitions of the three threatened categories (vulnerable, endangered, and critically endangered) are based on five criteria: population reduction rate , geographic range, population size, population restrictions , and probability of extinction . Threatened categories have different thresholds for these criteria. As the population and range of the species decreases, the species becomes more threatened. 1) Population reduction rate A species is classified as vulnerable if its population has declined between 30 and 50 percent. This decline is measured over 10 years or three generations of the species, whichever is longer. A generation is the period of time between the birth of an animal and the time it is able to reproduce. Mice are able to reproduce when they are about one month old. Mouse populations are mostly tracked over 10-year periods. An elephant's generation lasts about 15 years. So, elephant populations are measured over 45-year periods. A species is vulnerable if its population has declined at least 50 percent and the cause of the decline is known. Habitat loss is the leading known cause of population decline. A species is also classified as vulnerable if its population has declined at least 30 percent and the cause of the decline is not known. A new, unknown virus , for example, could kill hundreds or even thousands of individuals before being identified. 2) Geographic range A species is vulnerable if its “ extent of occurrence ” is estimated to be less than 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles). An extent of occurrence is the smallest area that could contain all sites of a species’ population. If all members of a species could survive in a single area, the size of that area is the species’ extent of occurrence. A species is also classified as vulnerable if its “ area of occupancy ” is estimated to be less than 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles). An area of occupancy is where a specific population of that species resides. This area is often a breeding or nesting site in a species range. 3) Population size Species with fewer than 10,000 mature individuals are vulnerable. The species is also vulnerable if that population declines by at least 10 percent within 10 years or three generations, whichever is longer. 4) Population restrictions Population restriction is a combination of population and area of occupancy. A species is vulnerable if it is restricted to less than 1,000 mature individuals or an area of occupancy of less than 20 square kilometers (8 square miles). 5) Probability of extinction in the wild is at least 10 percent within 100 years. Biologists, anthropologists, meteorologists , and other scientists have developed complex ways to determine a species’ probability of extinction. These formulas calculate the chances a species can survive, without human protection, in the wild. Vulnerable Species: Ethiopian Banana Frog The Ethiopian banana frog ( Afrixalus enseticola ) is a small frog native to high- altitude areas of southern Ethiopia. It is a vulnerable species because its area of occupancy is less than 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles). The extent and quality of its forest habitat are in decline. Threats to this habitat include forest clearance, mostly for housing and agriculture. Vulnerable Species: Snaggletooth Shark The snaggletooth shark ( Hemipristis elongatus ) is found in the tropical, coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its area of occupancy is enormous, from Southeast Africa to the Philippines, and from China to Australia. However, the snaggletooth shark is a vulnerable species because of a severe population reduction rate. Its population has fallen more than 10 percent over 10 years. The number of these sharks is declining due to fisheries, especially in the Java Sea and Gulf of Thailand. The snaggletooth shark’s flesh, fins, and liver are considered high-quality foods. They are sold in commercial fish markets, as well as restaurants. Vulnerable Species: Galapagos Kelp Galapagos kelp ( Eisenia galapagensis ) is a type of seaweed only found near the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Galapagos kelp is classified as vulnerable because its population has declined more than 10 percent over 10 years. Climate change is the leading cause of decline among Galapagos kelp. El Niño, the natural weather pattern that brings unusually warm water to the Galapagos, is the leading agent of climate change in this area. Galapagos kelp is a cold-water species and does not adapt quickly to changes in water temperature.

Endangered Species 1) Population reduction rate A species is classified as endangered when its population has declined between 50 and 70 percent. This decline is measured over 10 years or three generations of the species, whichever is longer. A species is classified as endangered when its population has declined at least 70 percent and the cause of the decline is known. A species is also classified as endangered when its population has declined at least 50 percent and the cause of the decline is not known. 2) Geographic range An endangered species’ extent of occurrence is less than 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles). An endangered species’ area of occupancy is less than 500 square kilometers (193 square miles). 3) Population size A species is classified as endangered when there are fewer than 2,500 mature individuals. When a species population declines by at least 20 percent within five years or two generations, it is also classified as endangered. 4) Population restrictions A species is classified as endangered when its population is restricted to less than 250 mature individuals. When a species’ population is this low, its area of occupancy is not considered. 5) Probability of extinction in the wild is at least 20 percent within 20 years or five generations, whichever is longer.

Endangered Species: Scimitar -horned Oryx The scimitar-horned oryx ( Oryx dammah ) is a species of antelope with long horns. Its range extends across northern Africa. Previously, the scimitar-horned oryx was listed as extinct in the wild because the last confirmed sighting of one was in 1988. However, the first group of scimitar-horned oryx was released back into the wild in Chad, in August 2016, and the population is growing. Overhunting and habitat loss, including competition with domestic livestock , are the main reasons for the decline of the oryx’s wild population. Captive herds are now kept in protected areas of Tunisia, Senegal, and Morocco. Scimitar-horned oryxes are also found in many zoos . Critically Endangered Species 1) Population reduction rate A critically endangered species’ population has declined between 80 and 90 percent. This decline is measured over 10 years or three generations of the species, whichever is longer. A species is classified as critically endangered when its population has declined at least 90 percent and the cause of the decline is known. A species is also classified as endangered when its population has declined at least 80 percent and the cause of the decline is not known. 2) Geographic range A critically endangered species’ extent of occurrence is less than 100 square kilometers (39 square miles). A critically endangered species’ area of occupancy is estimated to be less than 10 square kilometers (4 square miles). 3) Population size A species is classified as critically endangered when there are fewer than 250 mature individuals. A species is also classified as critically endangered when the number of mature individuals declines by at least 25 percent within three years or one generation, whichever is longer. 4) Population restrictions A species is classified as critically endangered when its population is restricted to less than 50 mature individuals. When a species’ population is this low, its area of occupancy is not considered. 5) Probability of extinction in the wild is at least 50 percent within 10 years or three generations, whichever is longer. Critically Endangered Species: Bolivian Chinchilla Rat The Bolivian chinchilla rat ( Abrocoma boliviensis ) is a rodent found in a small section of the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia. It is critically endangered because its extent of occurrence is less than 100 square kilometers (39 square miles). The major threat to this species is loss of its cloud forest habitat. People are clearing forests to create cattle pastures .

Critically Endangered Species: Transcaucasian Racerunner The Transcaucasian racerunner ( Eremias pleskei ) is a lizard found on the Armenian Plateau , located in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey. The Transcaucasian racerunner is a critically endangered species because of a huge population decline, estimated at more than 80 percent during the past 10 years. Threats to this species include the salination , or increased saltiness, of soil . Fertilizers used for agricultural development seep into the soil, increasing its saltiness. Racerunners live in and among the rocks and soil, and cannot adapt to the increased salt in their food and shelter. The racerunner is also losing habitat as people create trash dumps on their area of occupancy. Critically Endangered Species: White Ferula Mushroom The white ferula mushroom ( Pleurotus nebrodensis ) is a critically endangered species of fungus. The mushroom is critically endangered because its extent of occurrence is less than 100 square kilometers (39 square miles). It is only found in the northern part of the Italian island of Sicily, in the Mediterranean Sea. The leading threats to white ferula mushrooms are loss of habitat and overharvesting. White ferula mushrooms are a gourmet food item. Farmers and amateur mushroom hunters harvest the fungus for food and profit. The mushrooms can be sold for up to $100 per kilogram (2.2 pounds). Extinct in the Wild A species is extinct in the wild when it only survives in cultivation (plants), in captivity (animals), or as a population well outside its established range. A species may be listed as extinct in the wild only after years of surveys have failed to record an individual in its native or expected habitat.

Extinct in the Wild: Monut Kaala Cyanea The Mount Kaala cyanea ( Cyanea superba ) is a large, flowering tree native to the island of Oahu, in the U.S. state of Hawai‘i. The Mount Kaala cyanea has large, broad leaves and fleshy fruit. The tree is extinct in the wild largely because of invasive species. Non-native plants crowded the cyanea out of its habitat, and non-native animals such as pigs, rats, and slugs ate its fruit more quickly than it could reproduce. Mount Kaala cyanea trees survive in tropical nurseries and botanical gardens . Many botanists and conservationists look forward to establishing a new population in the wild. Extinct A species is extinct when there is no reasonable doubt that the last remaining individual of that species has died. Extinct: Cuban Macaw The Cuban macaw ( Ara tricolor ) was a tropical parrot native to Cuba and a small Cuban island, Isla de la Juventud. Hunting and collecting the birds for pets led to the bird’s extinction. The last specimen of the Cuban macaw was collected in 1864. Extinct: Ridley’s Stick Insect Ridley’s stick insect ( Pseudobactricia ridleyi ) was native to the tropical jungle of the island of Singapore. This insect, whose long, segmented body resembled a tree limb, is only known through a single specimen, collected more than 100 years ago. During the 20th century, Singapore experienced rapid development. Almost the entire jungle was cleared, depriving the insect of its habitat.

Endangered Species and People When a species is classified as endangered, governments and international organizations can work to protect it. Laws may limit hunting and destruction of the species’ habitat. Individuals and organizations that break these laws may face huge fines. Because of such actions, many species have recovered from their endangered status. The brown pelican ( Pelecanus occidentalis ) was taken off the endangered species list in 2009, for instance. This seabird is native to the coasts of North America and South America, as well as the islands of the Caribbean Sea. It is the state bird of the U.S. state of Louisiana. In 1970, the number of brown pelicans in the wild was estimated at 10,000. The bird was classified as vulnerable. During the 1970s and 1980s, governments and conservation groups worked to help the brown pelican recover. Young chicks were reared in hatching sites, then released into the wild. Human access to nesting sites was severely restricted. The pesticide DDT , which damaged the eggs of the brown pelican, was banned. During the 1980s, the number of brown pelicans soared. In 1988, the IUCN “delisted” the brown pelican. The bird, whose population is now in the hundreds of thousands, is now in the category of least concern.

Convention on Biological Diversity The Convention on Biological Diversity is an international treaty to sustain and protect the diversity of life on Earth. This includes conservation, sustainability, and sharing the benefits of genetic research and resources. The Convention on Biological Diversity has adopted the IUCN Red List of endangered species in order to monitor and research species' population and habitats. Three nations have not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity: Andorra, the Holy See (Vatican), and the United States.

Lonesome George Lonesome George was the only living member of the Pinta Island tortoise ( Chelonoidis abingdoni ) known to exist. The Pinta Island tortoise was only found on Pinta, one of the Galapagos Islands. The Charles Darwin Research Station, a scientific facility in the Galapagos, offered a $10,000 reward to any zoo or individual for locating a single Pinta Island tortoise female. On June 25, 2012, Lonesome George died, leaving one more extinct species in the world.

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Protecting Endangered Species

Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy

Despite continued conservation efforts, the status of many endangered species remains unchanged. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) are the primary treaties tasked with protection of endangered species. But moving forward, species conservation efforts should expand to include lesser known species that serve important ecosystem services. ( Download PDF ) ( See all policy briefs ) ( Subscribe to ENB )

The Persian leopard (Panthera pardus tulliana), the largest subspecies of leopards, used to roam widely across Central Asia and the Caucasus. They are large spotted cats—about five feet in length—with slender hindquarters and long, thick tails. Both male and female leopards lead solitary lives, though they come together during winter mating. They are very territorial, patrolling wide home ranges to scent-mark trees, shrubs, and rocks. The leopard inhabits a wide variety of habitats: from mountain crags up to 3,000 meters in elevation, to grasslands and cold desert ecosystems, with a preference for cliff and rocky areas, as well as juniper and pistachio woodlands that give them cover for hunting.

During the past century, human-wildlife conflict, indiscriminate killing of their prey, habitat loss, and bounties incentivizing their killing have reduced their historic range by 72-84% (Jacobson et al., 2016). Today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species—the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of species and subspecies, which uses a set of defined criteria to evaluate their extinction risk (Rodrigues et al., 2006)—the Persian leopard is endangered.

The story of the Persian leopard is the story of many species pushed by human action to the brink of extinction. Strong conservation measures can still reverse the course for some species. For many others, it is too late.

During the past century, human-wildlife conflict, indiscriminate killing of their prey, habitat loss, and bounties incentivizing their killing have reduced the leopard’s historic range by 72-84% JACOBSON ET AL., 2016

The foundations of global species conservation measures date back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment . Principle 2 of the Stockholm Declaration says “the natural resources of the earth, including the air, water, land, flora and fauna and especially representative samples of natural ecosystems, must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future generations.” Principle 4 reads “Man has a special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors.”

Among the 109 recommendations found in the Stockholm Action Plan , Recommendation 99 calls for the preparation and adoption of an international treaty to regulate international trade in certain species of wild plants and animals. This treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), had been drafted as a result of a resolution adopted in 1963 at a meeting of members of IUCN. As a result of the push provided by the Stockholm Conference, the Convention was finally adopted at a meeting of representatives of 80 countries in Washington, D.C. on 3 March 1973.

There are a few other relevant recommendations. Recommendation 29 draws attention to species of wildlife that may serve as indicators for future wide environmental disturbances. Recommendation 30 emphasizes drawing attention to the situation of animals endangered by their trade value. The Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan also legitimized the role of IUCN and especially the Red List, which had been established in 1964. In fact, IUCN was one of the few environmental organizations formally involved in the preparations of the Stockholm Conference and in the drafting and implementation of the three conventions that followed it: the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), CITES, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (1971).

What are Endangered Species: The Role of the IUCN Red List

Since its establishment, the IUCN Red List has been the key tool to assess the status of species and catalyze action for conservation and policy change. Through the List’s rigorous assessment processes, experts linked to the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s specialist groups collect information on a species’ range, population size, habitat and ecology, use and/or trade, threats, and conservation actions that inform necessary conservation decisions.

The assessments published in the IUCN Red List are used by governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and multilateral environmental agreements. The assessments drive conservation action and funding, albeit still in insufficient ways to always ensure saving species. In fact, Betts et al. (2020) noted that without successful communication between species experts, academics, policymakers, funders, and practitioners, IUCN Red List assessments may not lead to development and implementation of conservation action plans.

The IUCN Red List has nine categories to indicate how close a species is to becoming extinct. The closest to extinction is the “critically endangered” category, with a species example being the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), a subspecies found only in Iran that has dwindled to fewer than 50 animals remaining in the wild. The least critical category is defined as “least concern.” For example, the global brown bear (Ursus arctos) population is considered to be of “least concern” because it is large and spread over three continents, even though there are some local populations that are under threat. The categories in the middle, i.e., “vulnerable” and “endangered,” are for species considered under threat.

In other words, if a species is either critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable, it is in popular terms “endangered.”

This mismatch between the technical terms of the IUCN Red List and common language can lead to confusion. In 2016, a re-assessment of the snow leopard prompted an outcry from some members of the conservation community due the species’ being reclassified from endangered to vulnerable (McCarthy et al., 2016). Their anger was echoed by members of the public, in part because they did not understand “being vulnerable” under IUCN Red List criteria still means at high risk of extinction.

The way a species is assessed under the IUCN Red List can also determine whether such species deserve protection under two international treaties aimed at species conservation: CITES and the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). Listing an endangered species under either of these two conventions can catalyze further action and, possibly, save a species from extinction (Zahler & Rosen, 2013).

Without successful communication between species experts, academics, policy makers, funders, and practitioners, IUCN Red List assessment may not lead to development and implementation of conservation action plans. BETTS ET AL. (2020)

Regulating the Protection of Endangered Species

CITES and CMS are the key conventions tasked with regulating protection of endangered species.

CITES regulates international trade and therefore looks at the impact of trade on species conservation. Annually, international wildlife trade is estimated to be worth billions of dollars and to include hundreds of millions of plant and animal specimens. The trade is diverse, ranging from live animals and plants to an array of products derived from them, including food, exotic leather goods, wooden musical instruments, timber, tourist curios, and medicines. Since trade in wild animals and plants crosses borders between countries, the effort to regulate it requires international cooperation to safeguard certain species from over-exploitation. Today, CITES accords varying degrees of protection to more than 37,000 species of animals and plants, whether they are traded as live specimens, fur coats, or dried herbs (CITES, n.d.)

In the language of CITES, species listed under Appendix I are considered threatened with extinction and afforded the highest level of protection, including restrictions on commercial trade. Examples of the 931 species currently listed under Appendix 1 include gorillas (Gorilla sp.), tigers (Panthera tigris), and snow leopards (Panthera uncia). Appendix II includes species that, while currently not threatened with extinction, may become so without trade controls. It also includes species that resemble other listed species and must be regulated to effectively control the trade in those other listed species. Currently 34,419 species are listed under Appendix II, including saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), wolf (Canis lupus), argali sheep (Ovis ammon), and kiang (Equus kiang). Appendix III includes a list of wildlife and plant species identified by particular CITES parties as being in need of international trade controls.

The purpose of CMS is conservation of migratory species, their habitats, and migration routes. “Migratory” is broadly defined as species that straddle international borders (Lewis & Trouwborst, 2019). Migratory species threatened with extinction are listed in Appendix I of the Convention. Appendix I listing is a mechanism to promote conservation measures called, in CMS terminology, “Concerted Action” among the range states of the listed species. CMS parties commit to ensure strict protections under national laws and conserving their habitats, mitigating obstacles to migration, among other threats. Migratory species viewed as benefiting from international cooperation are listed in Appendix II of the Convention (CMS, n.d.). To date, seven specialized regional agreements and 19 memoranda of understanding have been concluded for Appendix II species under the CMS.

Representative Frameworks for the Conservation of Endangered Species

The development of models tailored to conservation needs throughout migratory ranges is a unique feature of the CMS. Along these lines, there are two important initiatives benefiting endangered species in Africa and Central Asia under the CMS umbrella.

One is the Central Asian Mammals Initiative (CAMI) and its associated Programme of Work. Established in 2014, CAMI aims to strengthen the conservation of Central Asian migratory mammals through a common framework to coordinate conservation activities in the region and coherently address major threats to migratory species. By developing an initiative for Central Asian mammals, CMS is catalyzing collaboration between all stakeholders, with the aim of harmonizing and strengthening the implementation of the Convention (Rosen & Roettger, 2014). One of the most recent projects under CAMI is the proposed development of a regional strategy for the conservation of the Persian leopard.

The Joint CITES-CMS African Carnivores Initiative (ACI), established in 2017, stems from the recognition of the importance of synergies and coordination of measures toward species that are protected under both Conventions. Supported by IUCN Species Survival Commission ’s specialist groups, the Secretariats are tasked to drive effective conservation of African lion, leopard, cheetah, and wild dog, and help avoid duplicate activities and associated costs, and generate funding.

By developing an initiative for Central Asian mammals, CMS is catalyzing collaboration between all stakeholders, with the aim of harmonizing and strengthening the implementation of the Convention ROSEN & ROETTGER, 2014

There are also two other important frameworks, each focused on the conservation of single species. One is the Global Tiger Initiative Council (GTIC), and the other is the Global Snow Leopard Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP).

GTIC was originally set up as the Global Tiger Initiative (GTI), a global alliance of governments, international organizations, NGOs, and the private sector, with the goal to save tigers from extinction. Established by the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Smithsonian Institution, Save the Tiger Fund, and International Tiger Coalition (representing more than 40 NGOs), the initiative is led by the 13 tiger range countries. The St. Petersburg Declaration , adopted in 2010 at the Tiger Summit in Russia, defines the priorities.

GSLEP, propelled by GTI and established in 2013, is driven by 12 snow leopard range states, NGOs, and international organizations, which sit on a steering committee. The foundation of the GSLEP is 12 individual National Snow Leopard and Ecosystems Priorities (NSLEPs). Under GSLEP, specific activities are grouped under broad themes that correspond to the commitments of the Bishkek Declaration adopted at the 2013 Global Snow Leopard Conservation Forum (Zakharenka et al., 2016).

Some of these initiatives have successfully catalyzed attention, resources, and conservation action. They have received a high level of political attention, especially GTI in Russia and GSLEP in Kyrgyzstan, as respective hosts of the Tiger Summit and Snow Leopard Forum. However, some conservationists argue, especially in relation to tigers, that results have fallen short, and lack of transparency and accountability is compromising progress in tiger conservation efforts. Slappendel (2021) writes that “tiger-range countries are responsible for making tiger conservation efforts and holding themselves accountable for their methods and results. There’s no authority above them, so they can do whatever they want.

While the reach and influence of CAMI and ACI are more limited compared to GTI and GSLEP, they have also generated important resources for conservation and could likely have a stronger policy-driving role in the future.

Generally, these four frameworks serve as important examples for directing donor resources.

The Role of UN Agencies and Donors

The GEF, established in 1992, is the largest multilateral fund focused on enabling developing countries to invest in nature. It supports the implementation of major international environmental conventions including on biodiversity, climate change, chemicals, and desertification. Endangered species prioritized under CITES and CMS, such as GTI and GSLEP, are also prioritized for GEF funding.

In 2010, the GEF indicated it would provide up to USD 50 million in grants to save the tiger through contributions to be invested by developing countries using their GEF allocations in biodiversity, supplemented by investments from its REDD+ Program (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable use of forests, and enhancement of carbon stocks) (GEF, 2010). Since 1991, the GEF has invested nearly USD 100 million toward snow leopard projects implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The GSLEP Forum in 2013 catalyzed nine further GEF-financed, UNDP-implemented projects, representing an investment of about USD 45 million to support snow leopard range countries. These nine projects also leveraged over USD 200 million in co-financing from national and international partners (UNDP, 2016).

UNDP has emerged as one of the key implementing UN agencies when it comes to endangered species and conservation projects more broadly. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has also spearheaded initiatives for the conservation of endangered species, such as Vanishing Treasures . This EUR 9 million project, funded by the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, seeks to better understand the vulnerability to climate change of the snow leopard, tiger, and gorilla and the ecosystems being affected.

Why Do Many Species Continue to be Endangered?

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned in its Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history—and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating” (IPBES, 2019).

Despite continued conservation efforts, the status of many endangered species remains unchanged—including tigers, lions, and cheetahs. The question is: Why? With our growing knowledge of the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems, why are we pushing entire species out of existence?

The limited amount of funding benefiting species research and conservation is one reason. Often these funds are short term, whereas to really see progress and results, a longer funding commitment is necessary. Some projects are also too narrowly focused on protection and enforcement, without seeking ways local communities can be part of the solution. Likewise, some projects do not address root causes of decline.

But there are also issues of capacity. In many countries that provide habitat for endangered species, there is limited technical capacity to protect such species. Local and national conservation organizations also would benefit from greater capacity building.

At the national level, species conservation may not be prioritized. This is often reflected in ministries tasked with both environment and agriculture or economic and mining issues—with the latter issues prioritized over conservation. Species conservation also does not operate in a vacuum, but must be considered alongside mechanisms to address threats to their survival, which may be exacerbated by conflicting development goals. For example, a development project aimed at improving access to water, through building dams and irrigation channels, may hurt access by salmon species to spawning grounds or damage riparian habitat. Finally, conservation organizations—with their own agendas and issues of competition for funding that leads to lack of cooperation—sometimes fail to create better synergies for conservation.

There are also many other endangered species that are not as well known or do not have the appeal of more popular endangered species, such as snow leopards or tigers. Some of these species have disappeared from large swaths of their range, including the striped hyaena (Hyaena hyaena), which can no longer be found in parts of Central Asia and Caucasus regions. The lesser-known Saint Lucia racer (Erythrolamprus ornatus), listed as Critically Endangered, numbers fewer than 20 individuals and is considered one of the rarest snakes in the world. Similarly, the Daguo Mulian tree (Magnolia grandis) is listed as critically endangered due to habitat loss for agricultural expansion and logging.

Moving Forward

Protecting iconic endangered species is still important for promoting policies and measures that can benefit entire ecosystems and many other endangered species. Nevertheless, species conservation efforts must expand to include many more species that are lesser known and serve important ecosystem services. Such efforts should also create incentives for local communities to conserve them, including through sustainable use when that is recognized as the only or the most effective measure. Finally, greater financial resources have to be allocated. Many hope the post-2020 global biodiversity framework will help guide the most pressing actions to keep entire species from being erased from our shared world.

Works Consulted

Betts, J., Young, R. P., Hilton-Taylor, C., Hoffmann, M., Rodríguez, J. P., Stuart, S. N., & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2020). A framework for evaluating the impact of the IUCN Red List of threatened species. Conservation Biology: The Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 34(3), 632–643. doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13454

Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. (n.d.). What is CITES? cites.org/eng/disc/what.php

Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. (n.d.). CMS. cms.int/en/legalinstrument/cms

Global Environment Facility. (2010). Global Environment Facility to support $50 million in grants to save the tiger. thegef.org/newsroom/news/global-environmentfacility-support-50-million-grants-save-tiger

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673

Jacobson, A.P., Gerngross, P., Lemeris, Jr., J.R., Schoonover, R.F., Anco, C., Breitenmoser-Würsten, C., Durant, S.M., Farhadinia, M.S., Henschel, P., Kamler, J.F., Laguardia, A., Rostro-García, S., Stein, A.B., & Dollar, L. (2016). Leopard (Panthera pardus) status, distribution, and the research efforts across its range. PeerJ 4:e1974. doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1974

Lewis, M., & Trouwborst, A. (2019). Large carnivores and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS)—definitions, sustainable use, added value, and other emerging issues. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7. frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fevo.2019.00491

McCarthy, T., Mallon, D., Jackson, R., Zahler, P., & McCarthy, K. (2017). Panthera uncia. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017. Panthera uncia (Snow Leopard) (iucnredlist.org)

Rodrigues, A.S.L., Pilgrim, J.D., Lamoreux, J.F., Hoffmann, M., & Brooks, T.M. (2006). The value of the IUCN Red List for conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 21(2), 71-76. doi.org/10.1016/j. tree.2005.10.010

Rosen, T., & Roettger, C. (2014). Central Asian Mammals Initiative: Saving the last migrations. CMS. cms.int/sites/default/files/publication/Central_Asian_Mammals_Initiative.pdf

Slappendel, C. (2021). What’s stopping some countries from keeping up with tiger conservation promises? Commentary. Mongabay news.mongabay.com/2021/11/whats-stopping-some-countries-from-keeping-up-with-tiger-conservationpromises-commentary/

UNDP. (2016). Silent Roar - UNDP and GEF in the snow leopard landscape. undp.org/publications/silent-roar-undpand-gef-snow-leopard-landscape

Zahler, P., & Rosen, T. (2013). Endangered mammals. Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Elsevier.

Zakharenka, A., Sharma, K., Kochorov, C., Rutherford, B., Varma, K., Seth, A., Kushlin, A., Lumpkin, S., Seidensticker, J., Laporte, B., Tichomirow, B., Jackson, R. M., Mishra, C., Abdiev, B., Modaqiq, A. W., Wangchuk, S., Zhongtian, Z., Khanduri, S. K., Duisekeyev, B., … Yunusov, N. (2016). The Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program. Snow Leopards, 559–573. doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-802213-9.00045-6

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Government of Norway, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Government of Sweden, Ministry of Environment

Government of Canada, Global Affairs Canada

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15 Ways to Help Protect Endangered Species

There are various steps you can take to protect endangered species and their precious habitats.  For example:

15 Actions to Protect Endangered Species

1) Learn about endangered species in your area. Teach your friends and family about the wonderful wildlife, birds, fish and plants that live near you. The first step to protecting endangered species is learning about how interesting and important they are. For more information about endangered species, visit endangered.fws.gov

2) Create a backyard wildlife habitat. Put bird feeders and other wildlife attractants, such as bird houses and baths.

3) Establish a pollinator garden with native vegetation in your yard. Native plants provide food and shelter for native wildlife. Attracting native insects like bees and butterflies can help pollinate your plants. Avoid planting invasive species. Non-native plants can overtake and destroy native species on which animals depend.

4) Minimize use of herbicides and pesticides. Herbicides and pesticides are hazardous pollutants that can affect wildlife at many levels. Reduce use of fertilizer. Excess fertilizer will likely wash into streams and rivers and may lead to amphibian deformities and deaths.

5) Reduce your use of water in your home and garden so that animals that live in or near water can have a better chance of survival. Don’t dump paint, oil or antifreeze or other chemicals, which pollute the water and can harm people and wildlife. Keep litter and pet waste out of the street drain, which often washes into rivers, lakes or the ocean.

6) Place decals on windows to deter bird collisions. Millions of birds die every year because of collisions with windows. You can help reduce the number of collisions simply by placing decals on the windows in your home and office.

7) Slow down when driving. Many animals live in developed areas and this means they must navigate a landscape full of human hazards. So when you’re out and about, slow down and keep an eye out for animals. Don’t litter because trash can attract wildlife to the roadside.

8) Recycle and buy sustainable products. Buy recycled paper and sustainable products like Forest Stewardship Council wood products and shade-grown coffee to save rainforests.

9) Don’t litter/otherwise destroy sensitive habitats, which may be home to native/visiting species that are endangered or threatened.

10) Organize or participate in a “clean up” campaign of an important habitat in your area. (Be sure to work with appropriate city officials/environmental organizations.)

11) Never purchase products made from endangered species like ivory, coral and tortoise shell. Buy exotic plants and animals only from reputable stores. 

 12) Report any harassment of threatened and endangered species. You can find a list of state wildlife departments at http://www.fws.gov/offices/statelinks.html

13) Visit a national wildlife refuge, park or other open space. These protected lands provide habitat to many native wildlife, birds, fish and plants. Get involved by volunteering at your local park or wildlife refuge. To find a wildlife refuge near you, visit http://www.fws.gov/refuges/ To find a park near you, visit http://www.nps.gov To learn more and get involved, contact the Endangered Species Coalition at 

14) Be Vocal. Write a letter to your local newspaper urging support of important species protection measures. E-mail your Congressional representatives asking them to support the Endangered Species Act. 

15) Join others (and organize) in the annual Stop Extinction Challenge. Organized by Endangered Species Coalition (usually in August).

Support grassroots organizing to defend endangered species. The Endangered Species Coalition works through grassroots organizing and mobilizing to keep wildlife and wild places protected.

Stay INFORMED

Join the Endangered Species Coalition Activist Network to receive emails with actions that you can take to protect endangered and threatened species.

About the Endangered SPECIES COALITION

The Endangered Species Coalition’s mission is to stop the human-caused extinction of our nation’s at-risk species, to protect and restore their habitats, and to guide these fragile populations along the road to recovery.

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Problem/Solution Endangered Animals

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Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals – IELTS Writing Task 2

Updated On Aug 02, 2024

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This article provides guidance for writing Agree-Disagree essays in IELTS, focusing on 'Protection of Endangered Species/Wild Animals'. It includes sample responses for band 7,8 & 9, relevant vocabulary, and connectors to help improve writing skills.

Table of Contents

• Band 7 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals
• Band 8 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals
• Band 9 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals

IELTS Writing Task 2 Connectors Used in the Sample Answers for Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals

Additional resources.

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Since agree-disagree questions form a significant part of IELTS Writing Task 2 , it is crucial to practise writing them. One example of such a question is ‘Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals’.

You can familiarize yourself with the framework of Agree Disagree essays in IELTS by practicing subjects like ‘Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals’, as Writing Task 2 can be difficult for many IELTS applicants. Additionally, you can review the IELTS Writing practice tests on a regular basis to achieve your desired band score.

Now let us move to the three expert-curated sample responses for varying IELTS band scores for the Agree Disagree essay, ‘Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals’.

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Some people think that a huge amount of time and money is spent on the protection of wild animals and that this money could be better spent on the human population. to what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion, use specific reasons and examples to explain your choice., you should write at least 250 words..

Band 7 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals

It is true that wildlife has suffered as a result of the economic success that people have experienced recently. As a result, people’s interest in the conservation of wild animals has always grown. Some believe, however, that the time and money devoted to this noble endeavour are almost excessive and that they need to be used instead on initiatives that directly assist the human race. Although there is some merit to this way of thinking, I believe that more work should be done by humans to safeguard wild animals.

Firstly, wildlife plays an important role in maintaining ecological balance, pollinating crops, and preventing the spread of diseases. Ignoring their protection may lead to unforeseen consequences, affecting human well-being in the long run. Secondly, tourism, which often revolves around wildlife, contributes significantly to economies. By investing in the protection of wild animals and their habitats, countries can attract tourists.

However, it is essential to acknowledge the importance of finding a balance. Some conservation efforts might seem extravagant, and redirecting a portion of those funds towards immediate human necessities could be beneficial. Governments and organizations should prioritize projects that address both wildlife protection and human welfare, ensuring a harmonious coexistence.

In conclusion, while there may be instances where funds for wildlife protection seem excessive, a comprehensive approach is necessary. Striking a balance between preserving our natural heritage and meeting human needs is key to building a sustainable and equitable future for both species. (241 words)

Band 7 Vocabulary

Check out the list of relevant vocabulary used in the above Band 7 IELTS Writing Task 2 sample essay .

Meaning: to try to do something

E.g.: His endeavours failed because he did not put any effort into it.

Meaning: the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward

E.g.: We were discussing the merits of regular exercise in the morning.

Meaning: not anticipated or expected

E.g.: Peter was not prepared for the unforeseen effects of his decision.

• Extravagant

Meaning: beyond any reasonable expectation

E.g.: Do not have any extravagant hope for your children.

Meaning: marked by agreement in feeling, attitude, or action

E.g.: The villagers maintained a harmonious relationship with their neighbors.

• Coexistence

Meaning: to exist together or at the same time

E.g.: The coexistence of the birds and the people in that area is noteworthy.

Meaning: treating everyone equally; fair

E.g.: The female employees protested for being denied equitable salary.

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Band 8 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals

While there is so much human suffering, the spending of resources to protect wild animals presents an ethical dilemma. However, I disagree with the opinion given, because it is possible to allocate resources intelligently to benefit both the animal and the human population.

The protection of wild animals must be high on the agenda of every individual citizen and government. Firstly, the red list of endangered species is increasing every year. If wildlife extinction continues, then humans may face an ecological crisis which impacts on their own survival. For example, if the practice of whaling is not halted, the ecosystems of our oceans will be altered forever, and this may affect fish stocks on which so many communities depend for a living. Secondly, protecting wild animals means protecting the habitats in which they live, such as rainforests and wetlands. If habitat destruction is permitted, climate change will affect our capacity to produce food to sustain the growing human population.

The formation of wildlife reserves not only protects wildlife, it also brings benefits to communities. In order to generate revenue for their management and to eliminate poaching, responsible ecotourism to observe animals in the wild can be developed further. This has been shown to create jobs in such places as the Serengeti National Park in Africa. The result is increased prosperity when local communities, especially in developing countries, are involved in the running of wildlife safaris, which attract visitors to the reserves. Thus, the application of intelligent strategies brings benefits for humans and wildlife.

In conclusion, I disagree with the view expressed in the statement. It is in the interest of everyone to protect wildlife, and creative solutions have shown that this need not be a drain on scarce resources. (289 words)

Band 8 Vocabulary

Have a look at the IELTS Vocabulary for Band 8 sample answer on 'Protection of Endangered Species/Wild Animals'.

• An ethical dilemma

Meaning: a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two different things, relating to beliefs about what is morally right and wrong

E.g.: Governments are facing an ethical dilemma over the use of animals in laboratory testing for drugs and cosmetics.

• The practice of whaling

Meaning: the activity of hunting and killing whales

E.g.: In order to protect these beautiful creatures, the practice of whaling should be banned completely.

• Wildlife reserves

Meaning: protected areas for wild animals

E.g.: The creation of wildlife reserves is essential to save animals such as tigers from extinction.

• In the wild

Meaning: in a natural environment not controlled by people

E.g.: Animals in the wild are able to exhibit their natural behaviour.

• High on the agenda

Meaning: to be among the first things in the list of actions to be taken

E.g.: The security of its citizens must be high on the agenda of governments.

• Allocate resources

Meaning: to make money and materials available to do something

E.g.: If governments allocate more resources to improving public transport, this will reduce the problem of traffic congestion in cities.

• Ecological crisis

Meaning: a serious situation that occurs when the environment of a species or population changes in a way that threatens its continued survival

E.g.: Environmental degradation caused by human activity is provoking an ecological crisis which threatens our existence.

• Habitat destruction

Meaning: the process that occurs when a natural habitat, like a forest or wetland, is changed so dramatically by humans that the plants and animals which live there can no longer survive.

E.g.: The elephant population in the world is declining because of habitat destruction caused by human exploitation of the environment.

• To eliminate poaching

Meaning: to stop all illegal hunting of wild animals

E.g.: In wildlife reserves, guards should be employed to eliminate poaching and to protect endangered species of wild animals.

Meaning: organized holidays which are designed so that tourists damage the environment as little as possible

E.g.: Ecotourism will become increasingly popular in the future, as more and more people become aware of the need to protect the environment.

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Band 9 Sample Answer for Writing Task 2 Question – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals

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To begin with, the dynamics which have contributed to the ailing health of the wildlife are majorly relevant to human actions. The usages of certain environmental deterrents like chlorofluorocarbons, DDT, and other hazardous pollutants have been major culprits in this regard. That being said, a lot of damage is already done, which to a larger extent is irrecuperable. The need of the hour, however, is to preserve and fortify the wildlife. For instance, the species of Asiatic Lion, which are only found in parts of India now, were deemed ‘Endangered’ mainly because of habitat loss owing to climate change, grazing, growing agricultural demands, etc. Therefore, it is of prime essence that the government and authorities should indeed focus on the judicial methods to safeguard the wildlife.

The government should invest in the rehabilitation of the natural environment, as in the purview of substantial development it is very crucial that nature and its resources are intact and unblemished. It could appear as an arduous deal to spend money and capital on wildlife. Conversely, it could promote and foster economical status as India largely attracts the international footfall for its flora and fauna, and hence it rather would be a prudential decision to strengthen the tourism baseline and capital bolstering.

Conclusively, it is in the best of human interest that the government spends and invests in the fortification of conservation of wildlife and is not at all an extravagance. (301 words)

Band 9 Vocabulary

Use the following Band 9 vocabulary while writing your essay on 'Protection of Endangered Species/Wild Animals' and improve your IELTS band score .

Meaning: the fact that there is too little of something

E.g.: There is a paucity of relevant information on the internet.

Meaning: to spend a lot of money on buying goods, especially expensive goods

E.g.: The millionaire splurged on his birthday party.

Meaning: something that prevents people from doing something by making them afraid of what will happen to them if they do it

E.g.: You should consider the deterrents of the project and be prepared with the solutions.

• Irrecuperable

Meaning: past/beyond redemption too bad to be redeemed or improved

E.g.: Always think before you act as your words and actions are irrecuperable.

Meaning: to strengthen something, esp. in order to protect it

E.g.: The palace walls are meant to fortify the women residing there.

Meaning: the limit of someone’s responsibility, interest, or activity

E.g.: This case falls within the purview of the Supreme court.

Meaning: difficult, needing a lot of effort and energy

E.g.: The traveler took an arduous journey to the unknown land.

• Unblemished

Meaning: not damaged or marked in any way

E.g.: The actress has unblemished skin and does not do any makeup.

Meaning: careful and avoiding risks

E.g.: The management needs to take some prudential decisions to make a good turnover.

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Connectors or Linking words helps to bring coherence to your writing and increase your chances of scoring a high band. So, check out the list of connectors / linking words for writing used in the sample responses for the IELTS Writing Task 2 – ‘Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals’ given below.

• As a result
• However/Conversely/In contrast
• Firstly…Secondly
• In conclusion/Conclusively
• For example/For instance
• To begin with
• That being said

Now that you have gone through the sample answers on the topic – Protection of Endangered Species/ Wild Animals – it is time for you to try writing on your own. For that, leave your answers as a comment below or you can use our Free IELTS Writing Essay Evaluation and Correction Service !

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• ESPU(African Organization): http://www.espu-trust.org/espu_app.txt
• CFTWI: http://www.careforthewild.org/about.html
• Endangered Species Coalition: http://www.stopextinction.org/org/index/html
• NESARC: http://www.nesarc.org/
• CITES: http://www.defenders.org/cites.html
• The Xerces Society: http://www.xerces.org/ (www.dogpile.com)
• The government has passed many laws and regulations to help the animals increase their population.
• The Endangered Species Act plays a big part in saving the animals.

Bibliography

• "Earth's Endangered Creatures." Endangered Animals. January 1, 2000. Save the Animals. January 17, 2001 "Endangered Animals." World Book Encyclopedia. 1998 ed.
• "Endangered Species" Compton's Encyclopedia. 1987 ed.
• "Endangered Species" Endangered Species. January 17, 2001 Habitat Preservation." Endangered Animals. May 12, 2000. Fisheries and Wildlife Services. January 17, 2001 Lampton Christopher. Endangered Species. Impact Books: New York, 1988

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