About 41 percent of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction
Credit: AFP

As the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) prepares to unveil a thorough diagnosis of the health of Earth’s plant and animal species, this is what we already know:

— Two species of vertebrate, animals with a backbone, have gone extinct every year, on average, for the past century.

— Scientists say Earth is undergoing a “mass extinction event”, the first since the dinosaurs disappeared some 65 million years ago, and only the sixth in the last half-a-billion years.

— About 41 percent of amphibian species and more than a quarter of mammals are threatened with extinction.

— About half of coral reefs have been lost in the last 30 years.

— The global populations of 3,706 monitored vertebrate species — fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles — declined by nearly 60 percent from 1970 to 2012.

— 25,821 species of 91,523 assessed for the 2017 “Red List” update were classified as “threatened”.

— Of these, 5,583 were “critically” endangered, 8,455 “endangered”, […]