World losing high-stakes fight against alien species
Invasive species that wreck crops, ravage forests, spread disease, and upend ecosystems are spreading ever faster across the globe, and humanity has not been able to stem the tide, a major scientific assessment said Monday.
The failure is costing well over $400 billion dollars a year in damages and lost income — the equivalent to the GDP of Denmark or Thailand — and that is likely a «gross underestimation», according to the intergovernmental science advisory panel for the UN Convention on Biodiversity (IPBES).
From water hyacinth choking Lake Victoria in East Africa, to rats and brown snakes wiping out bird species in the Pacific, to mosquitoes exposing new regions to Zika, yellow fever, dengue and other diseases, the report catalogued more than 37,000 so-called alien species that have taken root — often literally — far from their places of origin.
That number is trending sharply upward, along with the bill for the damage multiplying fourfold per decade, on average, since 1970.
Economic expansion, population increase and climate change «will increase the frequency and extent of biological invasions and the impacts of invasive alien species,» the report concluded.
Only 17 percent of countries have laws or regulations to manage this onslaught, it said.
Whether by accident or on purpose, when non-native species wind up on the other side of the world, humans are to blame.
The spread of species is hard evidence that the rapid expansion of human activity has so radically altered natural systems as to tip the Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, scientists say.
The hyacinth that at one point covered 90 percent of Lake Victoria — crippling transport, smothering aquatic life, blocking hydroelectric dam intake and
