CANBERRA, July 31 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have found that mining threatens more than 12,000 species worldwide, including nearly 6,000 already classified as "threatened."
Researchers in Australia and Britain combined global maps of mining activity with data on threatened species to examine the extent of mining-related risks to biodiversity, according to a summary of the study on the Australian Science Media Center website on Friday.
The study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability, showed that mining occurs in areas of unusually high biodiversity, including areas with higher richness of threatened species. The pressure is expected to intensify as new critical mineral mining projects are developed.
The team led by Australia's Charles Sturt University found that 28 percent of the ranges of threatened species overlap with mining areas, while more than 100 species have at least 75 percent of their range overlapping mining sites, despite mining not being recognized as a threat by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The authors warned that planned future mining projects could expose more than 3,000 threatened species to mining-related risks, with 83 percent of those species not currently designated by the IUCN as being threatened by mining.
These findings underscore the urgent need for more comprehensive accounting of mining impacts in conservation planning worldwide, they said. ■
