Notes from a rare planet: More than half of penguin species are under threat

This photo of Adelie penguins comes courtesy of Flickr user ¡WOUW!.

Four main factors are threatening penguins: over-fishing, climate change, pollution by the oil industry, and predation by introduced mammals.
“Because of the rapid increase in fishing operations in the past decades, penguins are now competing with us for food, and our industrial fishing fleets are simply more effective at catching fish. “The large scale harvesting of anchovy and sardine stocks have directly reduced the prey available to many penguin species including Macaroni and Chinstrap penguins in the South Atlantic” Thousands of penguins are also killed when they are caught in fishing nets.”

“Experts weighing in at World Water Week in Stockholm estimate that half of the irrigation water used around the world is lost to wasted food–the equivalent every year to half of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, or 365 trillion gallons (1,380 cubic kilometers).”
“In the U.S. alone, we throw away or waste about 30 percent of our food, the equivalent of about 11 trillion gallons (40 cubic kilometers) of irrigation water, according to a reportdistributed at the conference on the water footprint of food waste.”

Parts of North America and Europe cooled by as much 1 degree Fahrenheit in recent years because of irrigation. Parts of India up to 5 degrees.
The big question is: What happens if and when irrigation water starts to run out?

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Adventures in Conservation | Rare