• The new review State of the World’s Birds, found that approximately 48 percent of existing bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines.
• It is BirdLife International’s flagship science publication, using birds to assess the condition of our ecosystems as a whole.

• Around 48% of bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines.
• In India, nearly 80% species are declining in numbers, and almost 50% plummeting strongly.
• Around 57% of North American species are recording declining trends, a net loss of almost 3 billion birds since 1970.
• The situation is similar in the European Union, where trends across 378 species indicate an overall decrease in breeding bird abundance of 17-19% between 1980 and 2017.
• The study found that bird species and abundance data from the tropics is scarce but in many countries such as India, citizen science driven data was available.

Reasons behind this decline:

• The report has attributed the threat to almost half of the 10,994 recognised extant species of birds to the expanding human footprint on the natural world and climate change.
• The degradation and loss of natural habitats as well as direct overexploitation of many species are the key threats to avian biodiversity.