Elucidation on the media coverage of "Outstanding Environmental Issues"

News

On Monday, 20 September, State Secretary Van Geel of the Dutch Ministry of the Environment presented the report "Outstanding Environmental Issues", published by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency of the RIVM to the European Parliament. The report was covered in the Netherlands by several daily newspapers and television. Some of the news items reported a conclusion to the effect that 55% of the European species have become extinct in the last 150 years. This conclusion is, however, not correct.

The conclusion drawn in the report itself is that the number of individuals per characteristic species has dropped by approximately 55%, not the number of species. Therefore many species in Europe are becoming scarcer and several species even extinct, while some species are showing drastic increases, replacing other species. We see this, for example, in the muskrat, crow and stinging nettle, also known as synantropic or human-favoured species. The effect on nature of these developments is that various parts of Europe will become more and more alike, and so less and less 'diverse'.