with efforts to combat global warming doddering, the rising temperatures may lead to the extinction of as many as 380 animal and plant species. These are the findings of an international team of researchers, who used global warming projections for 2050 to assess extinction risk for species found in areas covering about 20 per cent of the Earth's terrestrial surface. "Extrapolation of the findings for the whole world show that over a million species could be threatened with extinction,' says Chris D Thomas, the lead author of the study.

To arrive at their results, the researchers relied on the law of species-area relationship that describes how the number of species in an area is linked to its size. The relationship is expressed in terms of a formula that predicts the number of species that become extinct or threatened when the area available to them is reduced by habitat destruction. Habitat may be destroyed as warming alters climatic conditions in an area.

The researchers estimated the risk of extinction using three methods