Vienna Institute for Nature Conservation and Analyses, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Apr 30;110(18):7342-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1216303110. Epub 2013 Apr 15.
Rapid economic development in the past century has translated into severe pressures on species survival as a result of increasing land-use change, environmental pollution, and the spread of invasive alien species. However, though the impact of these pressures on biodiversity is substantial, it could be seriously underestimated if population declines of plants and animals lag behind contemporary environmental degradation. Here, we test for such a delay in impact by relating numbers of threatened species appearing on national red lists to historical and contemporary levels of socioeconomic pressures. Across 22 European countries, the proportions of vascular plants, bryophytes, mammals, reptiles, dragonflies, and grasshoppers facing medium-to-high extinction risks are more closely matched to indicators of socioeconomic pressures (i.e., human population density, per capita gross domestic product, and a measure of land use intensity) from the early or mid-, rather than the late, 20th century. We conclude that, irrespective of recent conservation actions, large-scale risks to biodiversity lag considerably behind contemporary levels of socioeconomic pressures. The negative impact of human activities on current biodiversity will not become fully realized until several decades into the future. Mitigating extinction risks might be an even greater challenge if temporal delays mean many threatened species might already be destined toward extinction.
在过去的一个世纪里，经济的快速发展导致了土地利用变化、环境污染和外来入侵物种的传播等因素，给物种的生存带来了巨大的压力。然而，如果植物和动物的种群减少滞后于当代环境恶化，这些压力对生物多样性的影响可能会被严重低估。在这里，我们通过将国家红色名录上出现的受威胁物种的数量与历史和当代社会经济压力水平进行关联，来检验这种影响的滞后。在 22 个欧洲国家中，面临中高灭绝风险的维管植物、苔藓植物、哺乳动物、爬行动物、蜻蜓和蚱蜢的比例与 20 世纪中后期相比，更接近社会经济压力（即人口密度、人均国内生产总值和土地利用强度的衡量标准）的早期或中期指标。我们的结论是，无论最近采取了什么保护措施，生物多样性的大规模风险都远远滞后于当代社会经济压力的水平。直到未来几十年，人类活动对当前生物多样性的负面影响才会完全显现出来。如果时间上的滞后意味着许多受威胁的物种已经注定要灭绝，那么减轻灭绝风险可能会是一个更大的挑战。
