As many as two-fifths of Southeast Asia’s species — at least half of which are found nowhere else in the world — could go extinct over the course of this century, according to a study appearing in today’s edition of the journal Nature. The vast majority of those extinctions will stem from deforestation, which is expected to affect 74 percent of the region by 2100. The scientists based their findings on a close study of Singapore, where 95 percent of key habitats have disappeared since the island was colonized in 1819 and an estimated 28 percent of biodiversity has been lost — 881 of 3,196 recorded species. And the actual extinction level could be far higher, the scientists cautioned, because some populations are now too small to be viable in the long term.
