00:04Hello, and welcome to Global Pulse News.
00:08A new international assessment brings troubling news from the bottom of the world.
00:14Climate change is now pushing two of Antarctica's most iconic species,
00:19the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal, toward the brink of extinction.
00:25The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN,
00:32announced Wednesday that both species are being upgraded to endangered on its official red list.
00:39That list is the world's most authoritative census of at-risk wildlife.
00:45Let's start with the emperor penguin.
00:48Standing over three feet tall and weighing up to 100 pounds,
00:53it is the largest penguin species on Earth.
00:56But new projections show its population could be cut in half by the 2080s.
01:03Satellite data already reveals a loss of more than 20,000 adult penguins between 2009 and 2018.
01:13That is roughly 10% of the population.
01:16The main culprit? Sea ice loss.
01:19Philip Traython, a member of the IUCN working group,
01:24told CNN that emperor penguins breed, molt, and feed on sea ice.
01:30As that ice disappears, so does their habitat.
01:35Since 2016, seasonal sea ice decline has caused complete breeding failures
01:41in nearly half of all known emperor penguin colonies across Antarctica.
01:46Now, to the Antarctic fur seal.
01:49These seals are the smallest of Antarctica's seal species.
01:54They were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century,
01:58but conservation efforts brought them back.
02:00Now, they are in danger again.
02:03The IUCN has moved the fur seal from least concern directly to endangered.
02:10Its population shrank by more than 50% between 1999 and 2025.
02:18The reason?
02:19Climate change is reducing the availability of krill, their main food source.
02:24As ocean surface waters warm,
02:27krill are moving into deeper, colder waters farther offshore.
02:31That makes them much less accessible to land-based predators like the fur seal.
02:37Kit Kovacs, who led the fur seal assessment,
02:40told CNN that these changes in the South Atlantic
02:44mirror what has already happened in the Arctic,
02:47where hooded seals, harp seals, and ringed seals
02:51have all shown serious declines.
02:53The IUCN Red List classifications
02:57are separate from the U.S. Endangered Species Act,
03:01which listed the emperor penguin as threatened in 2022.
03:05The Antarctic fur seal is currently not listed under U.S. law,
03:10but scientists warn,
03:12without urgent action to address rising temperatures and melting sea ice,
03:17these two charismatic species may not survive the century.
03:21The U.S.
03:27The U.S.
03:27The U.S.
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