A GLOBAL assessment of the world’s most common birds, carried out by BirdLife International, has revealed that many species are in decline as a result of habitat loss.
The State of the World’s Birds 2008 report shows that 45 per cent of Europe’s common birds have seen numbers fall, as have more than 80 per cent of Australia’s wading species.
Farmland birds are worst affected however, with the number of European turtle-doves falling by 79 per cent.
In Africa, birds of prey were experiencing “widespread decline” outside of protected areas. In Asia, 62 per cent of the continent’s migratory water bird species were “declining or already extinct.”
Ali Stattersfield, BirdLife International’s head of science, said that people have been focusing efforts on threatened species instead of looking at biodiversity as a whole.
The report, which was presented at a world conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Monday, also shows that governments are failing to fund their promises to halt biodiversity loss by 2010.
Dr Mike Rands, BirdLife’s chief executive said: “Effective biodiversity conservation is easily affordable, requiring relatively trivial sums at the scale of the global economy.”
