A report has warned of a “catastrophic” decline in freshwater fish, with nearly a third threatened by extinction, threatening the health, food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world. The report, The World’s Forgotten Fishes, is by 16 conservation groups, including WWF, the London Zoological Society (ZSL), Global Wildlife Conservation and The Nature Conservancy.
Study of almost 2,500 rivers around the world showed that human activity has endangered freshwater fish biodiversity in significant ways in more than half of the researched waterways. According to it, 18,075 species of freshwater fish inhabit our oceans, accounting for over half of the world’s total fish species and a quarter of all vertebrates on Earth. This biodiversity is critical to maintaining not only the health of the planet, but the economic prosperity of communities worldwide.
Conservation groups said 80 species were known to have gone extinct, 16 in the last year alone. About 200 million people across Asia, Africa and South America rely on freshwater fishers for their main source of protein, jobs and livelihoods. But numbers have plummeted due to pressures including pollution, unsustainable fishing, and the damming and draining of rivers and wetlands.
Over the same time period, populations of larger species, known as ‘megafish’, have crashed by 94%.
“Nowhere is the world’s nature crisis more acute than in our rivers, lakes and wetlands, and the clearest indicator of the damage we are doing is the rapid decline in freshwater fish populations. They are the aquatic version of the canary in the coal mine, and we must heed the warning,” said Stuart Orr of the World Wildlife Fund.
The most impactful human activities have been excessive fishing, the interruption of the natural flow of rivers due to dams, inter-basin transfers and water withdrawal, increases in invasive species and climate change.
