The world's plants face mass extinction if climate change
remains unchecked and more efforts are not taken to encourage plant
conservation, warned experts on the second day of the Third Global
Botanical Gardens Congress in Wuhan, central China on Tuesday.
"About half of the earth's 400,000 plant species and 100,000
unclassified plant species will be threatened with extinction if
the temperature rises by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius in the next 100
years," said Dr David Bramwell, director of the Jardin Botanical
Gardens in Las Palmas, Spain.
A recent study of six biodiversity-rich regions covering 20
percent of the world's land areas including South Africa, Brazil,
West and Central Africa, and Australia, indicates that up to 37
percent of all species in these regions will be extinct by 2050, he
said.
Huang Hongwen, director of the Wuhan Botanical Gardens, said
plant and animal species around the world were growing at higher
altitudes and nearer to both the North and South Poles to keep pace
with global warming.
"A spate of recent studies show how hundreds of species -- from
butterflies to birds, plants, bats and rats -- have moved towards
the North and South Poles by up to 300 kilometers in the last 50
years. This was triggered by a temperature rise of only 0.6 degrees
Celsius over the last century and is only a prelude to the
consequences of global warming," said Huang.
He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) report published in 2001 predicted that the earth's
temperature would rise by two to six degrees Celsius over the
course of the 21st Century.
"A temperature rise of five degrees Celsius in addition to
habitat loss and other factors might cause the extinction of up to
80 percent of the world's plant species by the end of this
century," said Peter H. Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical
Garden in the US.
Sara Oldfield, the secretary-general of the Botanical Gardens
Conservation International (BCGI), said, "Mankind will face the
sixth massive extinction of plant species, following the fifth one
which can be traced back to 65 million years ago, the last time the
earth heated up due to natural factors.
"This time, the extinction will be caused mainly by human
activities which are closely related to habitat loss, climate
change, and over-exploitation of plant resources and pollution,"
she said.
"Faced with climate change and the prospect of mass extinction
of biodiversity, we have to conserve the most at-risk plant species
because biodiversity is so important for the future of mankind,"
said Dr Bramwell.
He said that more than 2,000 botanical gardens and many more
plant research institutes around the world should jointly establish
and contribute to the seed banks for the endangered species,
similar to Kew Garden's millennium seed bank.
He suggested that local and regional seed banks should also be
built, where endangered plants are moved from their habitats and
cultivated in botanical gardens or other natural reserves.
"Botanical gardens can also play a major role in monitoring the
effects of climate change," said Bramwell.
Bramwell also called for a United Nations-led program to be
established to pool action plans from various countries to save the
planet's fauna from becoming "depauperate.”
(Xinhua News Agency April 18, 2007)