Conservation union finds 16,300 species threatened

(Updates with briefing)

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - From the lowland gorillas of Africa to corals of the Galapagos Islands, more than 16,300 species are threatened with extinction, the World Conservation Union said on Wednesday in its annual Red List.

In what is billed as the world's most authoritative assessment of Earth's plants and animals, the global group considered 41,415 species and found that of those, 16,306 were under threat, said Craig Hilton-Tailor, the list's manager.

That is nearly 200 more species of wildlife than last year, Hilton-Tailor said in a telephone interview, adding that this estimate is "just the tip of the iceberg."

"It's a very bad news story," Jane Smart, head of the conservation group's species program, said at a briefing. "Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival."

Extinction rates are now about 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal, and climate change is already affecting biodiversity, endangered species experts at the briefing said.

The World Conservation Union -- a global group whose members includes nations, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and thousands of scientists -- aims to "influence, encourage and assist societies" to conserve nature and natural resources.

While it does not play a major role in U.S. decisions on wildlife conservation because the United States does this through its own Endangered Species Act, the conservation union is highly influential in other regions, particularly in developing countries which cannot afford to make their own assessments of which species are in trouble.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FACTOR

Three of the new species added to this year's list are corals in the Galapagos, which are critically endangered by the warm-water Pacific Ocean pattern El Nino and by climate change, the group said in a statement.

Hilton-Tailor said global warming is a factor in these and other species' endangerment, but not the only factor.

The Red List is aimed at policy makers and ordinary people, Hilton-Tailor said.

"If everybody on the planet cooperated and adopted a sustainable way of living, a lot of these problems would go away," he said. He acknowledged that such cooperation has not occurred in the course of human history.

Asked to name a particularly troubling example, Hilton-Tailor mentioned the western lowland gorilla, which moves from endangered to critically endangered on the latest list. Its decline is due to the Ebola virus and commercial hunting of so-called bush meat.

This case points up the need for better viral controls, and for an alternative source of food for people in the gorilla's range, from Angola to Congo to Gabon.

Development is the culprit in the decline of the Yangtze River dolphin, also known as the baiji, Hilton-Tailor said. It is critically endangered and possibly extinct, with perhaps one or two individual creatures remaining.

Changes in river flows due to dams, pollution, over-fishing and the use of electric shocks to fish in the Yangtze system are all factors in the cetacean's disappearance. Heavy river traffic in fast-developing China is another cause.

"Any poor dolphin would really have to do amazing acrobatics to avoid being hit by one of those ships," Hilton-Tailor said.

On the plus side, reptiles in North America are holding their own, with only 12 percent of snakes and lizards listed as threatened.