Impact of Climate Change on the Number of Threatened Species: International Evidence

Muzafar Shah Habibullah,Siow-Hooi Tan,Badariah Haji Din

doi:10.26710/rope.v1i2.1134

Abstract

Global warming is the price for economic development. Rapid industrialization produces greenhouse gases that trap the heat and make the earth warmer. The rise in temperature and changes in precipitation resulted in extreme weather conditions. Global climate change affects both physical and biological environments and the impacts on biodiversity is directly and indirectly. The direct effects of climate change includes the increased in temperature and precipitation that affect individual organisms, populations, species distribution and ecosystem compositions and functions. The indirect effects of climate change are through increased salinity and extreme weather events such as floods, cyclones and droughts that will have a profound negative impacts on the forest and biodiversity. The present study investigates the impact of climate change on the number of threatened species as proxy for biodiversity loss using a cross-national data consisting of 98 countries. We have estimated the impact of temperature, precipitation and the number of natural disasters occurrences on the number of threatened species, in particular birds, fishes, mammals, plants and reptiles. As control variables, we have considered government effectiveness (proxy for good governance) and the level of economic development (proxy for wealth). By employing Ordinary Least Square (OLS) with robust standard error and quantile regressions analyses, our results suggest that all three climate change indicators – temperature, precipitation and the number of natural disasters occurrences increase the number of threatened species (biodiversity loss). Higher economic development also affect the number of threatened species positively. On the other hand, good governance such as government effectiveness reduces the number of threatened species. Thus, practicing good governance, promoting conservation of the environment and the control of greenhouse gasses would able to mitigate biodiversity loss.

Highlights

The importance of biodiversity has caught the world’s attention
There is a positive relationship between climate change with j = naturaldisaster, temperature, precipitation, and the number of threatened species; in which increase in the frequency of natural disaster events, temperature and precipitation will lead to an increase in the loss of biodiversity; and on the other hand, the control variables such as economic development will affect biodiversity loss positively; while improvement in government effectiveness will reduce biodiversity loss
Data for the number of natural disasters occurrences was compiled from the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA)/Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster (CRED); while data on temperature was taken from Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) of the United Nations database which is available at www/fao.org/statistics/database/

Summary

Introduction

The importance of biodiversity has caught the world’s attention. In 1992, the leaders of 150 countries signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) during the Rio Earth Summit, with the commitment to the conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of biological resources and equitable sharing of the advantages arising from the use of biodiversity benefits (Earthwatch Institute, 2002). The number of threatened species – plants, fishes, amphibians, mollusks, birds, mammals, insects and reptiles have shown an increasing trends for the last two decades. For the 10 years period from 2006 to 2015, fishes, mollusks and reptiles experienced biodiversity loss, on average, at the rate of 8.0%, 8.5% and 12.5%, respectively. According to WWF (2016), the decline in species is due to a variety of factors including unsustainable agriculture, fisheries, mining, habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, climate change and pollution. It was found that the world’s ecosystem changed more rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century than at any time in human history. Over the past few hundred years, humans have increased the species extinction rate by as much as 1,000 times over the planet’s history

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