Ecological science and tomorrow's world

Beginning with an outline of uncertainties about the number of species on Earth today, this paper addresses likely causes and consequences of the manifest acceleration in extinction rates over the past few centuries. The ultimate causes are habitat destruction, alien introductions, overexploitation and climate change. Increases in human numbers and per capita impacts underlie all of these. Against a background review of these factors, I conclude with a discussion of the policy implications for equitably proportionate actions—and of the difficulties in achieving them.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2010-01-12

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rstb.2009.0164PMID 20008384PMCID 2842703
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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