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How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?

Bolam, FC; Mair, L; Angelico, M; Brooks, TM; Burgman, M; Hermes, C; Hoffmann, M; ... Butchart, SHM; + view all (2021) How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented? Conservation Letters , 14 (1) , Article e12762. 10.1111/conl.12762. Green open access

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Abstract

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contains the aim to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure the degree to which this was achieved, we used expert elicitation to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993–2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010–2020 (the timing of Aichi Target 12). We found that conservation action prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993, and 9–18 bird and two to seven mammal extinctions since 2010. Many remain highly threatened and may still become extinct. Considering that 10 bird and five mammal species did go extinct (or are strongly suspected to) since 1993, extinction rates would have been 2.9–4.2 times greater without conservation action. While policy commitments have fostered significant conservation achievements, future biodiversity action needs to be scaled up to avert additional extinctions.

Type: Article
Title: How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/conl.12762
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12762
Language: English
Additional information: © 2020 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Aichi biodiversity target, 12 Convention on Biological Diversity, Delphi method, extinction risk, species conservation, IUCN Red List
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10162407
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