2020, animal year
Audio 04:15
The pangolin has been mistakenly suspected to have played a role in the transmission of the new coronavirus.
© AP / Jefri Tarigan
By: Florent Guignard
7 min
The bat and the pangolin are the two most talked about animals in 2020, the year of the novel coronavirus.
Thirty-one species also disappeared from the planet last year, and 3,000 new species, animals and plants, are now threatened with extinction, under human and climatic pressure.
Publicity
2020, a bad year for animal reputation.
A zoonosis, a disease transmitted from animals to humans, SARS-CoV-2 in this case, has brought the human planet to its knees for almost a year.
And it is with the bat, that it all started, it which sheltered the new coronavirus.
Very quickly, a second animal found itself accused, the pangolin.
The biggest miscarriage of justice of the year.
The pangolin is innocent, the most poached animal in the world is ultimately not the intermediate host that allowed the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans.
So, in 2021, we stop joking about the pangolin!
In 2020, biodiversity was still struggling, according to the annual report, and alarming, as every year, from the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Thirty-one species declared extinct, like the “lost shark” in Southeast Asia, which so aptly bears its name.
Three thousand new species, animal and plant, are threatened with extinction, such as the freshwater dolphin.
In total, according to the IUCN, more than 35,000 species are at risk of disappearing from the planet over time.
Pachydermal baby boom
But there is also good news.
A baby boom, in 2020, among elephants in Kenya, thanks to the abundant rains.
In 30 years, the elephant population has doubled in the country.
An animal thought to have been extinct for half a century in the Horn of Africa, the Somali trunk shrew, has been rediscovered in Djibouti.
In Europe, the beaver has made a comeback in the Camargue, in the south of France - it had not been seen for 40 years.
And in India, the number of leopards has increased by 60% in four years.
In 2021, new species will be discovered, and others will disappear, threatened by human activity, urbanization, pollution and climate change.
2020 will have been one of the three hottest years in the world, and even in France the hottest year of all time.
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Biodiversity