WASHINGTON - Rare animals living in the world's national parks and other
protected areas will face extinction as climate change forces the Earth's
temperature higher, renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey warned Friday.
Creatures like China's pandas, Madagascar's lemurs and India's tigers will be
unable to migrate into more hospitable regions, Leakey said, and the reserves
that now protect them would become "extinction traps."
Many scientists believe the Earth has started warming because of the buildup of
carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere.
Leakey called for creation of an international fund of at least $100 million to
help endangered creatures survive the changes.
He convened a small forum of scientists and conservationists Friday at Stony
Brook University in New York to discuss the problem.
"We are in for a period of great extinction," he said. "This has grave
implications for biodiversity."
Among those attending the meeting Friday through Sunday are representatives of
the World Bank, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the United Nations
Environmental Program and various private nonprofit organizations.
Leakey, a member of Africa's famous family of paleontologists, said that many of
the world's most vulnerable and scarcest animals depend on national parks,
reserves and other protected areas for survival. He said those areas should be
thought of as "islands of biodiversity."
"If you look at the geological record, you find that during previous periods of
climate change, island animals suffered greater extinction than those on the
mainland," he said.
Lara Hansen, a biologist and chief scientist in the World Wildlife Fund's
climate change program, said biologists are just beginning to think about the
problem.
"People are talking about it," she said. "There may be ways to increase the
resilience of these species so they will be better able to deal with the
stress."
For example, she said, coral reefs that are not in polluted ocean water seem
able to withstand sea water warming a half-degree higher than those that receive
runoff from agricultural and urban areas.
Hansen, who is taking part in the Stony Brook forum, said Australia's Great
Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary are areas where
runoff appears to be hastening coral bleaching.
But, she said, "the first thing we need to do to assist the animals -- and
plants -- that live in the world's refuges is to reduce the production of
greenhouse gases."
Leakey, a self-trained paleoanthropologist, is former director of the Kenya
Wildlife Service.
He is best known for his discoveries in the 1970s of the earliest truly
human-like creatures Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
Although he is retired from active fossil hunting, his wife and daughter
continue their own paleontological digs.
His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, became famous in the 1960s for discoveries
in Kenya and Tanzania of fossils of ape-like creatures that walked upright and
had many traits resembling modern humans.