Scientists are reporting some disturbing news about the rate of species extinction these days. There has been a rapid increase in the number of species that are going, going and gone, mostly attributed to loss of ecosystems and biodiversity in general.

These losses are largely attributed to climate change, urban sprawl and pollution—all at the hands, or mostly at the hands, of humans. Scientist members of the Diversitas group of experts on diversity say that world leaders have failed to combat this loss as they had previously committed to do.

Extinction rates are proving to be a lot larger than they had been predicted to be just a few years ago. Freshwater species, such as frogs, crocodiles, fish and turtles, are having the largest impact; in fact, they’re becoming extinct—this is extinct as in GONE, remember, not endangered, not threatened, but off the face of the Earth forever—sixe times faster than marine and land animals.

Some experts even made this scary prediction: By 2025, no Chinese river will be able to reach the sea at all, except in the case of a flood.

The group is working on a new set of goals to combat these hypotheses and data—but as they’ve already aptly demonstrated, world leaders may simply not give a damn. What if this blind eye continues to be given to these problems? We have no way of knowing how these extinctions will affect the world’s ecosystems—including those who live in them, such as ourselves—overall.

Seven years ago leaders created a draft at the Johannesburg Earth Summit to make a huge impact on reversing or at least reducing biodiversity loss by the year 2010. Well, 2010 is around the corner—and instead of progress, all we’ve seen is a bad situation getting worse.

While it’s true that we’ve seen some incredible species finds, the fact remains that we lose 27,000 to 30,000 species every year. Many argue that it’s natural for species to die out as a process of natural selection. While this is also true, the current rate of extinction is actually 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate—which points at a greater cause than Darwin.

Some scientists say that by year 2022, over a fifth of the species we have identified will no longer exist. We have orchestrated the sixth major mass extinction on the planet, and we’re not even an asteroid or an Ice Age.