By Staff
The global loss of wildlife has an enormous impact on humans and the ecosystem. Biodiversity matters because it supports living organisms and helps balance communities. The ecosystem and organisms are important to the world because all organisms are connected to each other, which keeps each other balanced and their biomes alive and useful for other organisms to live there. Without them, the ecosystem wouldn’t be useful, and it wouldn’t provide anything essential, like, for example, support for nature, clean air, soil for production, and regulating the climate. There are many reasons why wildlife is decreasing and some of the major factors are human activities, pollution, and climate change.
Human activities are one of the major reasons why wildlife is decreasing. When humans are doing industrial development, many animals lose their habitat and their access to essentials they need for living. For example, according to the WWF on Asian Elephants, “Asia is the most populous continent on Earth, where development and economic growth have led to encroachment into places where elephants live. This has led to an average of 70% of elephants being found outside protected areas today.” (WWF). Elephants are important to the environment because they help maintain forests and grassland habitats and leave pathways for other animals to travel . Expanding areas on wildlife habitats, like the Asian elephants, can be very frightful because having wildlife close to communities can cause big conflicts between them. Which means people can kill them for money, making animals extinct, or animals that have deadly diseases they carry around them, like Rabies, can infect humans.
Another reason why wildlife is decreasing is pollution and climate change. Pollution is very harmful to the environment. It destroys animals and their habitats, land, water, and air quality. For example, according to the article “Most Polluting Industries in 2023 Revealed,” from the website Heatable, it talks about many industries that pollute the earth more and how there were more than 8.7 million deaths in 2021 alone. (Heatable, Oct 5, 2023) This is a major issue because not only does pollution affect wildlife, but it also affects humans. Pollution has always threatened nature in many ways, to the point where it affects our surroundings daily. Pollution also contributes to climate change. From factories that create pollution and burn trash, they create toxic chemicals that go through our atmosphere, heating up our planet more than it needs to be heated. Our earth needs greenhouse gasses for heat, but too much heat can affect every living thing. High temperatures around the world can affect people and animals in various ways. For example, places where the temperature is hot on average can increase because of climate change, which is awful for animals and the people who live in those places. Heatwaves are terrible for people who are in poverty and for people who don’t have equipment for the heat, like a fan or air conditioner, because they might have a heatstroke and will sweat a lot. For animals, their fur might make them more hot, and when they touch the ground, their paws will be in pain from the heat. Also, an increase in heat around the world can melt icebergs, making the water rise more.
Overall, global wildlife is very important to the environment. They balance each other’s populations and help nature provide essentials for living things. Three major reasons why wildlife is decreasing are human activities, pollution, and climate change. Human activities contribute to the global loss of wildlife because of industrial development and how they spread into wildlife habitats, destroying their habitats and having conflicts with humans. Another two reasons why global wildlife is decreasing are because of pollution and climate change. Pollution also increases global loss of wildlife because it infects air, land, and water. Pollution also increases climate change because factories and the burning of trash worsen the temperature of the atmosphere, affecting the environment. Some actions individuals can take to improve climate change and wildlife are to donate money to organizations that help take action to help our environment, walk, ride a bike, or take public transportation, and to save energy at home.
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