Focus on land-based ecosystems causes collapse of freshwater biodiversity that cascade into irreversible existential impacts – exacerbates every affirmative impact

A silent mass extinction is occurring in lakes, rivers and wetlands. Freshwater species are rapidly disappearing in North America and throughout the world. Conservation-minded people might be unaware of this, because of the media’s longstanding focus on land-based ecosystems and charismatic animals. The United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), to be held in Montreal in December, is an opportunity to reassess priorities. The goal of the summit is to advance the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework that aims to bring about “a transformation in society’s relationship with biodiversity.” Such a transformation would require citizens to have a clear understanding of what is at risk in freshwater ecosystems, which are both disproportionately rich in species and disproportionately threatened. Freshwater ecosystems outperform terrestrial and marine ecosystems in terms of the amount of biodiversity they support. Lakes, rivers and wetlands account for less than one per cent of the Earth’s surface area and yet hold nearly 10 per cent of all living species, including one-third of all vertebrate animals and more than half of all fish species. North America itself is a freshwater biodiversity hotspot. Our continent contains more species of fish, molluscs, crayfish, amphibians and aquatic insects than most other regions of the world. Much of this biodiversity is rapidly declining. During the past century, there have been at least 120 extinctions of North American freshwater animals. Several hundreds more species have become endangered and some of these, too, may already be gone. The true magnitude of this biodiversity loss is unknown, as there have almost certainly been species that went extinct before anyone realized they existed. North American freshwater animals are disappearing five times faster than those on land. If current trends persist, our continent will lose as much as four per cent of its endemic freshwater species every decade—a rate of extinction similar to that of tropical forest ecosystems, which are thought to be the most threatened on the planet.