A small brown rodent, the Bramble Cay melomys, in Australia became the first mammal to go extinct due to human-driven climate change. The detail was in an announcement by the Australian environment minister, hidden in a footnote in a release about ten threatened species.

The rats were first seen by Europeans on the island in 1845, and there were several hundred there as of 1978. But since 1998, the part of the island that sits above high tide has shrunk from 9.8 acres to 6.2 acres. That means the island's vegetation has been shrinking, and the rodents have lost about 97 percent of their habitat.

The extinction did not come as a surprise. A detailed survey carried out in 2014 had found no evidence of the little mammal in its small range of 4 hectares (40,000 square metres), and had suggested it be declared ‘possibly extinct’. Some reports suggest that it was already considered extinct in 2016.

The proximate cause of the extinction is the destruction of the habitat due to sea rise and flooding. This is directly caused by human-induced climate change that has warned our earth as carbon emissions over the last two centuries have led to the warming of the earth. Humanity has driven this little rodent to extinction.

This event should be a wake-up call for people across the globe, but in particular for the countries that border the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region. The HKH region is warming faster than the plains, with large impacts on the ecosystems, and biodiversity. It is also one of the richest biodiversity spots on the planet and that biodiversity is critically dependent on a habitat that is rapidly undergoing change to both climate change and human intervention.

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