IUCN Updated Red List: All Freshwater Dolphins Threatened

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on the status of biological diversity of species, has released an updated Red List of Threatened Species recently.

• The IUCN categorises species according to population numbers with ‘Extinct’ describing a complete disappearance and the category ‘Least Concern’ on the opposite end.

Highlights

• There are now 1,28,918 species on the IUCN Global Species Programme and nearly a third or 35,765 of them are threatened with extinction. These include about one-third of all oak trees, about 45 per cent of a whole family of flowering plants found in the Southern Hemisphere, 26 ....