Biodiversität

With increasing speed the earth is losing its great wealth of animals and plants. Nowadays 17,291 specimens are on the Red List of threatened animal and plant species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). Since the year 1500, 870 species have died out, 27 % of them between 1970 and 2005. This can only be a rough estimate for only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million animals and plants known worldwide were surveyed. Particularly high is the number of unrecorded species dying out in the rain forests of the earth. For our oceans, too, a dramatic decline in the variety of species has been recorded.