Most biologists will tell you that the Earth is losing species faster than it is replacing them. One prominent biologist, Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has said about two new reports coming out in March (2010):

“Measuring the rate at which new species evolve is difficult, but there’s no question that the current extinction rates are faster than [replacement]; I think it’s inevitable.”

The IUCN created shock waves with its major assessment of the world’s biodiversity in 2004, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans.

No formal calculations have been published since, but conservationists agree the rate of loss has increased since then, and Stuart said it was possible that the dramatic predictions of experts like the renowned Harvard biologist E O Wilson, that the rate of loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate in two decades, could be correct.

“All the evidence is he’s right,” said Stuart. “Some people claim it already is that … things can only have deteriorated because of the drivers of the losses, such as habitat loss and climate change, all getting worse. But we haven’t measured extinction rates again since 2004 and because our current estimates contain a tenfold range there has to be a very big deterioration or improvement to pick up a change.”

[Source: The Guardian]

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