A recently published study has found that “[c]limate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate.”
The study, “Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change,” published in the journal Scientific Reports, was a joint effort by Australian and Italian researchers from Flinders University in Adelaide and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, respectively.
To conduct the study, the researchers created 2,000 “virtual Earths.” They then added in different stressors such as abrupt climate change replicating that which we are now experiencing, a nuclear winter following the detonation of multiple nuclear weapons, and a massive impact from an asteroid.
Each scenario resulted in showing that plant and animal species that are wiped out by any of these extreme environmental changes dramatically increases the risk of a domino effect that could annihilate all life on Earth.
Co-Extinction
The researchers found that these worst-case scenarios led to what they called “co-extinctions,” wherein an organism dies out because it is dependent upon another doomed species.
The team developed models to predict ecosystem function and resilience, including past, present and predicted future ability to change and adapt.
The study found that the fastest way to doom all life on Earth was to remove the most ecologically important species — the species with the most connections in their ecological network — first. And those species are, in general, the ones most likely to go first when it comes to warming.
“At least in our simulations, heating tends to remove the ecologically most important species first,” reads the results of the study.
When the researchers modeled a warming planet, they found that it had an effect that was similar to the experiment they ran in which they removed the most ecologically important species.
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