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Each year, the IUCN Red List unveils the global inventory of species, both plant and animal, threatened with extinction. The 2022 list will be published this Thursday, July 21, 2022.
Animals to protect. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) unveils its global red list of endangered species on Thursday. The committee uses a list of specific criteria to determine which animal and plant species are at risk of extinction.
IUCN is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection of nature. Founded in 1948, its mission is to alert societies to the state of biodiversity but also to encourage and assist them in protecting it.
The 2021 Red List classified 40,084 species as threatened out of the 142,577 studied by the IUCN. Among them, 26% belonged to the category of mammals, 13% to that of birds and 41% to amphibians.
France is one of the 10 countries hosting the largest number of endangered species. Whether in metropolitan France or overseas, 1,889 species appear on the IUCN red list. Among the most endangered species in France, the Apron du Rhône, the lizards of the Pyrenees, the black petrel of Bourbons in Reunion, the European mink or the brown bear.
Species classified in 9 categories
The process of reviewing global species allows the IUCN to classify them into nine different categories to determine the level of alert. The NE and LC categories corresponding to Not Evaluated and Data Deficient therefore do not allow a precise classification of these species.
Three other categories can be considered intermediate level, Least Concern (LC), Near Threatened (NT) and Vulnerable (VU). The last four, Endangered (EN), Critically Endangered (CR), Extinct in the Wild (EW) and Extinct (EX) are the most alarming.
The IUCN considers five criteria for classifying species into the CR, EN and VU categories. These are the size of the population of the species, the rate of decline of the latter, its geographic range, the degree of settlement of these areas and the rate of fragmentation of the distribution of the species.
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