According to the study, by 2050 the Earth could lose up to 10% of its biodiversity.

Cascading extinction of species is inevitable. A new model-based study shows that land will lose on average up to 10% of its animals and plants by 2050 due to land use and changing of the climate.

Average biodiversity loss could reach 27% by 2100, according to a paper published Scientific achievements in which European and Australian scientists collaborated.

The research is focused on cascading or co-extinctions. When a species disappears directly due to disturbance (primary extinction), another may appear that is predatory towards the first one, which will also disappear because it ran out of food.

In the case of plants, if they lose their pollinating insects because the climate is too hot, they also die, since all species depend on others in one way or another.

The authors caution that the approaches so far considered for estimating extinction trajectories in the next century have been hampered by the fact that they did not account for co-extinctions.

Thus, they developed a new tool to model the interconnected loss of species, using the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, with the goal of predicting the associated fate of species that are likely to become extinct due to the ravages of global warming. changing of the climate and land use.

virtual earth

The tool “represents a grim prediction of the future of global diversity, confirming beyond doubt that the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction,” according to Flinders University (Australia).

The team created a large virtual Earth of networks of interconnected species, connected by who eats whom, and then applied climate change and land use to the system to achieve predictions for the future.

The virtual species could also re-colonize new regions by changing weatheradapt to some extent to changing conditions, die out directly due to global changes, or fall victim to a cascade of extinctions.

“Basically, we populated the virtual world from scratch and mapped the fate of thousands of species around the planet to determine the likelihood of tipping points in the real world,” explained Giovanni Strona from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

In this way, they were able to assess adaptation to different climate scenarios and relate it to other factors to predict a co-extinction model.

This study is unique in that it also takes into account secondary impacts on biodiversity, assessing the impact of species extinction on local food webs beyond the direct effects of primary extinction.

“Children born today and living into their 70s can witness the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species, from the tiniest orchids and the tiniest insects to emblematic animals like the elephant and koala, throughout their lives. life,” said Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University, one of the signatories.

(As reported by EFE)