These are mainly birds, which are put in serious danger by climate change: 22 animal species have been declared extinct in 2021
The climate crisis is putting the Earth, the ecosystem and all its inhabitants at serious risk. Among them, also the animals. They are often forced to adapt, reducing their size. They often get sick, and die by the hundreds. Often, and this is much more serious, they go extinct.
Extinct animals in 2021
This is, in the United States alone, 22 animal species and one plant. Some, like the Hemignathus hanapepe, a chubby yellow Hawaiian bird, haven’t been seen in the wild for more than a century. Now they will all have to be moved from the endangered species list to the extinct species list.
There are plenty of birds on the list: there are at least 3 billion fewer birds in American skies today than in 1970. The ivory-billed woodpecker, the Kauai Moho, the Kauai Great Thrush, the Poo Uli, last seen in 2004, and many others have been declared extinct.
There’s also a bat, which was called the Guam Flying Fox. There are fish, like the little St. Mark’s Gambusia or the Noturus Trautmani. And then there are six different species of mussels. As we said there is also a plant, the Phillostegia glabra.
Some of these losses, according to scientists, were not inevitable, indeed: “extinction processes are predictable and reversible,” explains Tierra Curry, a biologist who is in charge of studying endangered species.
More and more animals are going extinct
According to a 2019 United Nations report, the rate of species extinction is happening today at a rate tens to hundreds of times faster than in the last ten million years. The culprits are the destruction of natural habitats, animal exploitation, the establishment of invasive species, climate change, and pollution: in a word, humans.
Since 1500, 680 vertebrate species have been declared extinct: 150 of them in the United States alone, though there are fears it could be many more. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the 23 species we listed above extinct.
In the U.S., as well as in many other countries around the world, there is a law to protect endangered animals, and that has saved 291 species since it went into effect in 1973. Today, there are 1667 animals at risk of extinction.
But scientists are not losing hope: every extinct species is an incentive to fight for the protection of endangered animals. And, every now and then, some good news comes along, too.