Today's Crossword: The dash to save a million animals - will we succeed?
Our animal themed Crossword forces us to consider species that are about to disappear
In the age of the Internet and data-hungry technology, you might believe humans know everything they need to know about the world they live in. But in 2011, scientists estimated that the Earth is home to 8.7 million species of animals – and a vast majority of them have not yet been identified.
Click start to play today’s Crossword, which tests your knowledge of animals starting with the letter ‘A’.
Only 1.2 million species have been formally assessed – that’s 14 per cent of the world’s species – and most of them are from the land rather than the oceans.
According to the study, published in the US-based journal PLoS Biology, it could take more than 1,000 years to catalogue all the species in the world, and many of them could become extinct before they can even be studied.
In 2019, the United Nations released a report revealing that nearly one million species face extinction because of human activities and climate change. The landmark report, which was over 1,000 pages long, was the culmination of the work of 450 researchers and 15,000 scientific and government documents.
In it, scientists stated that about 75 per cent of the Earth’s land, two-thirds of its oceans and 85 per cent of crucial wetlands have been severely altered or lost – thereby accelerating the global loss of species.
With the situation seemingly growing more hopeless by the minute, can humans break the cycle and get our world in order?
A groundbreaking study published in February 2020 in the Sweden-based journal Ecography, provides a solution to save more than half of these species, while slowing climate change: conserve 30 per cent of tropical regions. By considering the current and potential movements of species in response to global warming, scientists modelled different climate change scenarios to find the regions where species are likely to be in the future.
So, if humans limit the Earth’s temperature increase to two degrees Celsius and conserve 30 per cent of tropical land, we can cut species extinction in half.
Do you think humans can stop the extinction event? Play today’s Crossword and tell us at games@gulfnews.com.