Giraffes Put on Watch List, Population Falls 40% over 30 Years
31 replies, posted
[quote]Numbers have gone from around 155,000 in 1985 to 97,000 in 2015 according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The iconic animal has declined because of habitat loss, poaching and civil unrest in many parts of Africa.
Some populations are growing, mainly in southern parts of the continent.
Until now, the conservation status of giraffes was considered of "least concern" by the IUCN.
However in their latest global Red List of threatened species, the ungainly animal is now said to be "vulnerable", meaning that over three generations, the population has declined by more that 30%.
According to Dr Julian Fennessy, who co-chairs the IUCN giraffe specialist group, the creatures are undergoing a "silent extinction".
"If you go on a safari, giraffes are everywhere," he told BBC News.
"While there have been great concern about elephants and rhinos, giraffes have gone under the radar but, unfortunately, their numbers have been plummeting, and this is something that we were a little shocked about, that they have declined by so much in so little time."
The rapid growth of human populations has seen the expansion of farming and other forms of development that has resulted in the fragmentation of the giraffe's range in many parts of Africa. But civil unrest in parts of the continent has also taken its toll.
"In these war torn areas, in northern Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia in the border area with South Sudan, essentially the giraffes are war fodder, a large animal, extremely curious that can feed a lot of people," said Dr Fennessy.
A study in recent months suggested that the giraffe was actually four different species but for this update of the Redlist, the IUCN have stuck with the traditional definition of one species with nine subspecies.
Of these, five have had falling populations, one has remained stable while three have grown. Different outcomes seem to be highly dependent on location.[/quote]
[url=http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38240760]BBC[/url]
i am of the firm belief that there are too many people.
not advising murder nor lusting for the fall of humanity, but this world would be far happier with about 10% of us on it
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
otherwise countless species begin to get wiped off just like this
[QUOTE=Bynine;51497583]i am of the firm belief that there are too many people.
not advising murder nor lusting for the fall of humanity, but this world would be far happier with about 10% of us on it
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
otherwise countless species begin to get wiped off just like this[/QUOTE]
how about you start us off with that
Why is it always the cool animals that die, why can't it be spiders or mosquitos or something?
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51497715]Why is it always the cool animals that die, why can't it be spiders or mosquitos or something?[/QUOTE]
that would be worse
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51497715]Why is it always the cool animals that die, why can't it be spiders or mosquitos or something?[/QUOTE]
we'd be fucked if spiders all died off. even mosquitos are ecologically important and their absence would upset many food chains
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
at people responding to my post: i like humanity. i think humanity has gotten too big for itself, is continuing to get bigger, and a lot of people and wildlife alike suffer as a result. don't take that as anything more than an observation
[QUOTE=Marbalo;51497721]This "humanity sux" meme is really getting irritating.[/QUOTE]
He's not wrong though, with the rate things are going either the population growth has to be curbed or we have to lower our living standards a lot if we don't want to get fucked by our own impact on the environment.
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
Basically either we do something or our planet is going to force both those choices on us tenfold.
I think we need more people so we can make bigger spaceships so we can all leave earth and fuck space over.
That way the Giraffes can go on and we can watch earth grow from outside it. It should be our ant farm.
[QUOTE=Marbalo;51497877]Literally none of the problems currently facing earth is the result of overpopulation.
The problem has and always will be for the predictable future - poor management of resources. We arent starving because there's no food, but rather because the food doesn't reach the people that need it. We aren't running out of place to live, but rather deliberately limit the amount of real estate there is because of companies and regulations. We aren't killing giraffes off because we just don't give a shit about giraffes, but rather because we keep fighting our wars and dont manage our farms properly to plan in advance for the animals that live on those lands in the first place.
Everytime someone blames humanity simply being too great in numbers I cringe, simply because it's just edgy and a completely uninformed opinion. Literally everything can be solved by proper management and calculation with a sprinkle of foresight. That's it.
It has nothing to do with the population of earth.[/QUOTE]
You're being incredibly optimistic. If all of the earth's current population lived to modern western standards, it wouldn't be sustainable. You're delusional if you think we could do that sustainably with a population of 10 billion people, even with perfect resource efficiency.
No shit the simple fact humans exist in great number isn't a threatening fact per se, it's the fact all the problems we cause scale with our population that is an issue. And among those problems is our perpetual pursuit for better living standards, the upper limit of which decreases with population if you don't want them to be disastrous for the environment or limited to a small elite.
Population is a key factor and to ignore it would be stupid. Either global population growth slows down or we lower our living standards to ones that don't require such overabundance of resources, there's no other choice.
You can't sustain infinite growth on finite resources, it's not a question of engineering or planification, it's a simple logical fact.
Overpopulation IS a significant problem and will become worse unless we bring living standards in poor countries with high birthrates up to acceptable standards and give them necessary sex education. EVEN THEN, in the [I]best case senario[/I], we're looking at 10 billion people when our planet is dying with 7 billion.
We have got to hope and pray we either find a way to terraform planets, long distance thousand-year long space travel is viable, or that it is possible to go beyond the speed of light. Otherwise, billions are going to die and the human race has a huge chance of dying out.
[QUOTE=Marbalo;51497877]Literally none of the problems currently facing earth is the result of overpopulation.
The problem has and always will be for the predictable future - poor management of resources. We arent starving because there's no food, but rather because the food doesn't reach the people that need it. We aren't running out of place to live, but rather deliberately limit the amount of real estate there is because of companies and regulations. We aren't killing giraffes off because we just don't give a shit about giraffes, but rather because we keep fighting our wars and dont manage our farms properly to plan in advance for the animals that live on those lands in the first place.
Everytime someone blames humanity simply being too great in numbers I cringe, simply because it's just edgy and a completely uninformed opinion. Literally everything can be solved by proper management and calculation with a sprinkle of foresight. That's it.
It has nothing to do with the population of earth.[/QUOTE]
Earth's ecology definitely does have a limit to the number of humans it could support without tearing itself apart, usually called a carrying capacity in fancy terms.
[url]http://worldpopulationhistory.org/carrying-capacity/[/url]
[url]https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf[/url]
Depending on the exact model used the CC of the earth is estimated from 2 billion to 40 billion humans, the wide margin introduced by alterations to suit different lifestyles. (eg. avg american consumation supporting only a few billion, avg. african consumption supporting tens of billions.)
We don't know the exact CC based on our current situation, but it is safe to say overpopulation is starting to take its toll on (at least) fish population due to overfishing in the North Sea. To name something that is locally noticeable. This is nothing that proper management could probably handle, but it would require a lot of people to lower their standards of living/drastically change their lifestyle which people aren't keen to do on a day to day basis. In this case the fall of giraffe numbers might not be directly related to the human world population, but it is regardless a imminent problem which shouldn't be taken lightly.
[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;51497954]Overpopulation IS a significant problem and will become worse unless we bring living standards in poor countries with high birthrates up to acceptable standards and give them necessary sex education.[/QUOTE]
This, most western countries already have negative growth rates, which shows that societal factors can heavily influe on demographics. If satisfying living standards can be more easily achieved in developing countries, there would be less of an incentive to have numerous children.
[QUOTE=_Axel;51497988]This, most western countries already have negative growth rates, which shows that societal factors can heavily influe on demographics. If satisfying living standards can be more easily achieved in developing countries, there would be less of an incentive to have numerous children.[/QUOTE]
Ironically I live in a country that is bucking the trend and has the highest birthrate in Europe IIRC (it has the highest in the EU at-least).
[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;51497954]We have got to hope and pray we either find a way to terraform planets, long distance thousand-year long space travel is viable, or that it is possible to go beyond the speed of light. Otherwise, billions are going to die and the human race has a huge chance of dying out.[/QUOTE]
Space colonization wouldn't achieve anything demographics wise, apart from providing a backup in case of human extinction back on Earth. Colonizing ships wouldn't realistically be able to hold over a thousand people, negligible when compared to our global population.
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Marbalo;51497999]You're bringing up a completely different issue, although a tangible one.
In the future as population increases, some of the problems we will face can, in actuality, be attributed to overpopulation itself as a problem simply because we would start running out of resources to be able to sustain that much people, comfortably.
However, that future is several decades away from us. We may be facing some serious problems somewhere in the year 2050 by some estimates, but as it currently stands, in 2016, it's shifting the blame entirely from our poor managing skills (a fact) unto overpopulation itself (a widely propagated myth), and it's completely unproductive. For us to be able to face our not so distant future with the proper tools, we must encourage ourselves to hone our existing tools of management and foresight right now and as soon as possible - to be able to cope with the future overabundance of humans. The change must come, and I'm very much confident that with so many recent medical and technological breakthroughs we had in past decades up until this very day, the only thing that remains is tackling the management aspect of it all. To be able to bring those breakthroughs to even the most remote places on Earth.
Housing, food, electricity, emissions, etc, all must be solved so that we may overcome the obstacle. But it's important to cement the point once more, that the issue we are facing is not overpopulation, but rather the management of population as it currently stands.[/QUOTE]
But the current population is a problem since it exacerbates our current per capita impact on the planet. It's not a different issue, both are closely linked.
You also keep talking about the only issue being a managerial one. As I said, even with a perfect efficiency, there comes a point where our current standards of living aren't sustainable. Sole optimization can't make up for that fact. Either said standards become even more restricted to a select few or we collectively lower them.
[QUOTE=Marbalo;51498099]What about the fact that we may able in the near future change Earth's carrying capacity simply by altering ecology itself as we are doing right now, although on a smaller scale, using technology and knowledge?
The estimates don't take into account our somewhat ingenious way of manipulating the course of nature itself to suit our needs, or to satiate our sympathy. Alongside all the species we have pushed to extinction, for example, we have also saved countless others. What stops us from mitigating our effects on fish populations through some form of crafty interference, like for example mass-breeding fish, or declaring certain species as endangered thus garnering the attention and protection of our many institutions and organizations dedicated to that express purpose?
I continue to believe that humanity could face almost all obstacles thrown its way - simply by properly managing and understanding its own effects on the environment, with a dash of crafty use of technology. This includes overpopulation. However I still dont believe that overpopulation is a serious problem at this day and age, and the effort to place the issue to light is misplaced and unnecessary.[/QUOTE]
Technology and science isn't something that progresses linearly. It's by essence unpredictable. Going "eh we'll just invent something to counter the problem" and doing nothing to prevent the problem from existing in the first place is a dumb strategy and people will only realize it once the problem finally comes up and they still haven't thought up a way to counter it.
The unpredictable progress of science is not something you should rely on when it comes to the survival of our species. Any projections should be made assuming we remain at or close to our current technological level instead of off the assumption we'll have flying cars and time-travelling machines by 2050.
The prospect of bees going extinct is a clear example of why prevention should take precedence over wishful thinking. Do you expect humans to come up with an efficient way to pollinize flowers without them? If not, then you should probably focus on preventing their extinction. Same goes for limiting population/lowering living standards.
[QUOTE]Instead of complaining about there being too humans on earth, we should instead complain about the fact that we aren't doing a very good job of handling it.[/QUOTE]
Or we could do both?
[QUOTE]Correct, however we have not reached that point yet, and wont for quite some time. It's a waste of energy and effort to combat this problem when there is a far more pressing issue, the management of it all, so that in the future - when overpopulation will start having serious effects on us, we would be already equipped to handle it.[/QUOTE]
You're saying we shouldn't worry about prevention since we'll come up with incredible ways to handle overpopulation. How can you know that? What makes you think there [I]is[/I] a way to sustain 10 billion people at our current living standards? Unless of course by "better equipped" you mean "already used to somewhat lower living standards", which is the only thing achievable using today's means.
[QUOTE=Bynine;51497583]i am of the firm belief that there are too many people.
not advising murder nor lusting for the fall of humanity, but this world would be far happier with about 10% of us on it
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
otherwise countless species begin to get wiped off just like this[/QUOTE]
So basically gas humanity
There isn't any morally acceptable way to curb overpopulation. Apart from the obviously out of bounds murder, telling people to stop repopulating will do nothing. Adding a limit like china would help but will also lead to more problems and is arguably inhumane. Preventing specific people from reproducing is also morally wrong.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds (and man it's dumb) I feel like the only way this could work is if you were given like £5000 if you chose to not have a kid ever. No better incentive than money.
[QUOTE=Hogie bear;51498226]There isn't any morally acceptable way to curb overpopulation. Apart from the obviously out of bounds murder, telling people to stop repopulating will do nothing. Adding a limit like china would help but will also lead to more problems and is arguably inhumane. Preventing specific people from reproducing is also morally wrong.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds (and man it's dumb) I feel like the only way this could work is if you were given like £5000 if you chose to not have a kid ever. No better incentive than money.[/QUOTE]
Why do people keep thinking limiting overpopulation necessarily comes in the form of mass murder, sterilization or other human rights violations?
Negative population growth is already a thing in most developped countries without any authoritarian interference. It's simply a matter of looking at which factors causes it and reproduce the same environment in booming countries so that people may willingly limit their birthrate.
[QUOTE=Coyoteze;51497716]that would be worse[/QUOTE]
Mosquitos would have no weight, they would become extinct unnoticed.
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Bynine;51497583]i am of the firm belief that there are too many people.
not advising murder nor lusting for the fall of humanity, but this world would be far happier with about 10% of us on it
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
otherwise countless species begin to get wiped off just like this[/QUOTE]
I am of firm believe that people who advocate for action must be the first to go.
[QUOTE=Bynine;51497583]i am of the firm belief that there are too many people.
not advising murder nor lusting for the fall of humanity, but this world would be far happier with about 10% of us on it
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
otherwise countless species begin to get wiped off just like this[/QUOTE]
I'd more blame Africa being abandoned as a pile of unstable shit and people encouraging the poaching.
The amount of people really isn't the problem (yet at least,) if we managed and used resources effectively there's enough for everybody to have decent lives. And hell, unstable conditions help cause overpopulation.
[QUOTE=shian;51498188]So basically gas humanity[/QUOTE]
no! god no! i don't want people to die. i just think we fucked up making this many of ourselves to begin with. it's becoming more and more difficult to sate the demands of an ever increasing populace
[editline]8th December 2016[/editline]
i also agree with the poster talking about how we're not handling resources efficiently. we're not, tons of food and supplies are wasted, but overpopulation feeds into that problem and vice versa
[QUOTE=Lolkork;51497673]dont reproduce pls[/QUOTE]
Well I won't but I see 10 other people around getting married and shit so yeah there's no stopping any time soon maybe all the icecaps melting will get rid of a bit of the population so there's that.
Also still no snow here and this has never happened before in eons.
[QUOTE=spectator1;51500624]Well I won't but I see 10 other people around getting married and shit so yeah there's no stopping any time soon maybe all the icecaps melting will get rid of a bit of the population so there's that.
Also still no snow here and this has never happened before in eons.[/QUOTE]
No snow where? Here in Romania? It snowed dude, get out of the basement once in a while.
[QUOTE=_Axel;51497927]You're being incredibly optimistic. If all of the earth's current population lived to modern western standards, it wouldn't be sustainable. You're delusional if you think we could do that sustainably with a population of 10 billion people, even with perfect resource efficiency.
No shit the simple fact humans exist in great number isn't a threatening fact per se, it's the fact all the problems we cause scale with our population that is an issue. And among those problems is our perpetual pursuit for better living standards, the upper limit of which decreases with population if you don't want them to be disastrous for the environment or limited to a small elite.
Population is a key factor and to ignore it would be stupid. Either global population growth slows down or we lower our living standards to ones that don't require such overabundance of resources, there's no other choice.
You can't sustain infinite growth on finite resources, it's not a question of engineering or planification, it's a simple logical fact.[/QUOTE]
Maybe we should curb our irrationally opulent western living standards then
[QUOTE=No Party Hats;51501059]Easy to say, but I can't see you holding this belief when the actual process transpired[/QUOTE]
I already live in a country with far lesser (though still quite developed) living standards than the US
In my life time, I can witness the extinction of most of the major species on earth. What a time we live in!
Now? Why is it Africa has so many third world countries if it's got most of the worlds resources? It seems silly that they aren't dictating terms to those whoever wants to buy it and that they genuinely don't have a stronger economy than the rest of the world.
Alternatively, they could just adopt the US dollar and sell it directly in that just like the barrel.
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