State Of World’s Birds Report: Highlights
The State of World’s Birds report was recently published.
- It is a peer-reviewed journal.
- It is BirdLife International’s flagship science publication, using birds to assess the condition of our ecosystems as a whole.
Highlights of the 2022 report:
- Around 48% of bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines.
- In India, nearly 80% species are declining in numbers, and almost 50% plummeting strongly.
- Around 57% of North American species are recording declining trends, a net loss of almost 3 billion birds since 1970.
- The situation is similar in the European Union, where trends across 378 species indicate an overall decrease in breeding bird abundance of 17-19% between 1980 and 2017.
- The study found that bird species and abundance data from the tropics is scarce but in many countries such as India, citizen science driven data was available.
- The report has attributed the threat to almost half of the 10,994 recognised extant species of birds to the expanding human footprint on the natural world and climate change.
- The degradation and loss of natural habitats as well as direct overexploitation of many species are the key threats to avian biodiversity.
BirdLife International is a global partnership of non-governmental organizations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats.
- Headquarters: United Kingdom Cambridge, United Kingdom.
