27 October 2010: The Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank, and Birdlife International have launched an Alliance for Zero Extinction, to protect sites where species are in imminent danger of disappearing.

Presented at the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the new platform will generate, over the next four years, a global map of key sites for extinction avoidance, to spearhead targeted action. The Alliance for Zero Extinction has identified the epicenters of imminent extinction – sites that are the last and only remaining refuge for severely threatened species, classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The map includes 920 globally highly threatened species that are confined to some 587 single sites spread across the globe. Loss of any of these sites, due to habitat degradation or other threats, would precipitate final extinction, at least in the wild. [GEF Press Release] [Map of key sites for extinction avoidance]