Protection, restoration and promotion of sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainable forest management, combating desertification and stopping and reversing land degradation and halting biodiversity loss
The extinction of species has always been a natural part of evolution. Fossils show that life on the planet originated more than four billion years ago, the date of birth of some bacteria and blue-green algae. Over the next three billion years, major groups in the body slowly formed. From now on, each appearance of a new group is invariably associated with the suppression and disappearance of another similar one. The average lifespan of a species (organism group) is five million years, so the whole spectrum of species has changed more than once. However, the process did not run at a constant pace. There are several periods of mass extinction that have “wiped out” about half of all extinct forms from the planet. And even periods of stability (lasting hundreds to thousands of years) are marked by species losses. It turns out that an average of 90 species naturally disappear every 100 years. The selective elimination of some species and the emergence and predominant development of others has led to the current mosaic of life, of which man is a part.
The process of natural loss of species continues today, but there is one more thing: in recent centuries, human activity has accelerated it more and more. There are data that about 400 birds and mammals have disappeared in the last 400 years and that the process is accelerating: from one extinct mammal every five years in the seventeenth century, to one every two years in the twentieth. It should be noted that birds and mammals make up less than 1% of all species identified by science, which in turn are an insignificant part of the total number of species on Earth. This trend is an indicative indicator, although it does not answer the question “What about biodiversity?” Today, the scientific community is unanimous: the species are disappearing much faster than even the most pessimistic forecasts, leading to habitat impoverishment and putting the world on the brink of a new period of mass extinction, but this time man-made.