Background to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
More than 40,000 species are assessed as threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List (IUCN 2023). Extrapolations from these data suggest that more than one million species may be at risk of extinction, while extinction risk is increasing in those taxonomic groups that have been assessed (Purvis et al. 2019: Section 2.2.5.2.4: see also Hochkirch et al. 2023). A total of 909 species are known or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500 (IUCN 2023a), and 84 species are known or suspected to exist only in captivity (IUCN 2023a). While there are numerous other manifestations of the biodiversity crisis, such as declines in genetic diversity (Exposito-Alonso et al. 2022), risk of ecosystem collapse (Nicholson et al. 2021), and reduction of ecosystem services (Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2019), losses among the other species with which we share our planet are the most fundamental, popularly recognised, and best-known human impacts on living nature.