Quarter of freshwater fish at risk of being wiped out

Nearly a quarter of the world's freshwater fish are at risk of extinction due to global heating, overfishing and pollution, according to an expert assessment.

From the large-toothed Lake Turkana robber in Kenya to the Mekong giant catfish in south-east Asia, many of the world's freshwater fish are at risk of disappearing, the first International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list assessment of the category has found.

Nearly a fifth of all threatened freshwater species are affected by climate change, from impacts such as falling water levels, shifting seasons and seawater moving up rivers. Of the 14,898 assessed species, 3,086 were at risk of vanishing.

The assessment also found that mahogany, Atlantic salmon and green turtles were increasingly threatened.

There was good news about the saiga antelope, which has moved up from the critically endangered category to near threatened after the population increased 1,100% in just seven years, mainly in Kazakhstan.

Reintroduction of scimitar-horned oryx in Chad is another success story.