Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilization.

The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.

Nearly one in five of the world’s estimated 10,000 species of lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodiles and other reptiles are threatened with extinction, according to a study conducted by 200 experts.

But the risk of extinction was found to be unevenly spread throughout the extremely diverse group of animals. According to the paper, an alarming 50% of all freshwater turtles are close to extinction, possibly because they are traded on international markets.

There’s a new frontline on the battlefield between the two baddest armies of environmental change—global warming and biodiversity loss. The question is whether or not to relocate endangered species to ecosystems they’ve never inhabited in order to save them from the real or predicted loss of their natural ecosystems from climate change.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that approximately 25% of mammals, 33% of amphibians, 12% of birds, and 20% of plant species currently face the threat of extinction. Furthermore, the AFP reporter says that international conservation group WWF states that people are currently living at a level exceeding the Earth’s biocapacity by more than 50-percent, and that “by 2030 humans will effectively need the capacity of two Earths.”

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 unless fishing fleets are slashed and stocks allowed to recover, UN experts warned Monday.

“If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.