Australian Rat Declared Extinct Due To Man-Made Climate Change

2/20/2019 06:18 pm ET Updated 5 hours ago

One expert said the island mammal “is just the first of what will be countless species lost to climate change if we don’t get our pollution under control.”

By Chris D’Angelo

The Australian government has confirmed the extinction of a small rodent native to a tiny spit of sand in the northernmost part of the Great Barrier Reef ― the first known mammal lost to human-caused climate change.

Bramble Cay melomys lived on the coral island of Bramble Cay, located in the Torres Strait between Queensland state and Papua New Guinea. The Government of Queensland initially declared the species extinct in a 2016 report, and Australian Environment Minister Melissa Price confirmed the die-off in a press release this week. The whiskered rat has been officially reclassified from “endangered” to “extinct.”

Geoff Richardson, an official with Australia’s Department of the Environment and Energy, told lawmakers on Monday that the declaration “was not a decision to take lightly,” according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

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The 2016 report concluded that the “key factor responsible for the extirpation of this population was almost certainly ocean inundation,” which resulted in “dramatic habitat loss and perhaps also direct mortality of individuals.” Sea levels around the world have risen by an average 8 inches since the beginning of the 20th century, and are forecast to rise by as many as four additional feet by 2100, according to NASA. Thousands of low-lying atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans could be left uninhabitable by the mid-century, a recent study found.

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/australia-rat-extinction-climate-change_n_5c6dca24e4b0e37a1ed47b1c