Threats to terrestrial biodiversity

Abstract

More than a billion people inhabit Tropical East Asia today and negative impacts on ecosystems and wild species are pervasive. Historically, the ultimate driver has been human population growth, but while this is now slowing, there is no prospect of an early reduction in human impacts. Poverty, corruption, weak governance, and globalization are additional underlying drivers. The major proximal threats and their consequences—deforestation, habitat fragmentation, mining, urbanization and infrastructure development, logging and the collection of non-timber forest products, hunting and the wildlife trade, fires, invasive species, emerging infectious diseases, air pollution and nutrient enrichment, and anthropogenic climate change—are described in turn in this chapter. Finally, the problems of assessing and predicting extinctions are discussed.