UN assessment highlights greater need for protection against species that can permanently alter the healthy functioning of an ecosystem and cause local extinctions, resulting in large-scale economic and environmental damage
“Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and can cause irreversible damage to nature, including local and global species extinctions, and also threaten human wellbeing,” wrote Prof Helen Roy, Prof Aníbal Pauchard and Prof Peter Stoett, who led the research.
The assessment, produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services , the leading UN body on biodiversity science, was produced by 86 experts – including scientists and Indigenous communities – over four and a half years, and was approved by governments this weekend in Bonn.
The top three invasive species include water hyacinth, an aquatic plant native to tropical South America that blocks waterways and damages fisheries, the flowering shrub lantana, and the black rat. Other examples include invasive mosquito species, such as Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti, that spread West Nile virus and the Zika virus.
“One of our real concerns is the loss of the uniqueness of communities of life. As we see more invasive species around the world, we start to see communities looking more similar. Of course, we have concerns about the functioning of those ecosystems and their resilience. Very sadly, the example of Hawaii is one to present as an example of ways in which we’re seeing this worsening and interactions among these global drivers of biodiversity loss,” said Roy.
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