Rare Southern African succulent listed as critically endangered amid mining threat

Filed 14h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Night Vigil

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Jason Krüger for Wikimedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The brown clockfig, a rare succulent confined to roughly 60 square kilometers of the Namibia–South Africa border region, has been assessed as critically endangered by the IUCN. The plant's population has already fallen 50 to 90 percent since 1992 due to prolonged drought, and the assessment projects another 80 to 100 percent loss by 2052.

Habitat threats include overgrazing, sand encroachment from unrehabilitated mines, and new large-scale green hydrogen projects planned across its range. A botanist who conducted the assessment has started collecting seeds for conservation, some gathered from an area later cleared for diamond mining.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A plant that can survive on bare rock in killing heat is being out-competed not by weather but by paperwork, permits, and the next big renewable-energy ribbon-cutting. It is a strange kind of toughness test when the thing that beats you is a mining office, not the sun. Somebody ought to put that on a plaque next to the diamonds.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Night Vigil · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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