State of World’s Birds report

• The State of World’s Birds report was recently published.
• It is Birdlife International’s flagship science publication, using birds to assess the condition of our ecosystems as a whole.
• BirdLife International is a global partnership of non-governmental organizations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats.
• Headquarters:  Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Highlights of the 2022 report:

• Around 48% of bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines.
• In India, nearly 80% species are declining in numbers, and almost 50% plummeting strongly.
• The situation is similar in the European Union, where trends across 378 species indicate an overall decrease in breeding bird abundance of 17-19% between 1980 and 2017.
• The study found that bird species and abundance data from the tropics is scarce but in many countries such as India, citizen science driven data was available.

 Reasons behind this decline:

• The report has attributed the threat to almost half of the 10,994 recognised extant species of birds to the expanding human footprint on the natural world and climate change.
• The degradation and loss of natural habitats as well as direct overexploitation of many species are the key threats to avian biodiversity.