Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard highlights a new U.N. report finds one million species face extinction globally and unfortunately, the Trump administration's Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service is adding to the problem.

• What can donors do to help push policymakers in the right direction when it comes to conservation and saving our world's species from extinction? 

• Here's an article reporting on the threat of extinction for our planet's species from human land use. 

The Earth's life support systems are in precipitous decline, mass wildlife extinction is on the rise, and the very underpinnings of human society are in peril. That was the grave message hundreds of the world's leading scientists sent on Monday when they released the initial summary of a forthcoming 1,500-page report on the biodiversity crisis that threatens ecosystems across the globe.

Backed by the United Nations and more than 130 countries around the world, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBES) found in its shocking summary that "around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss."

This vast crisis, the assessment found, is being driven by logging, mining, overfishing, farming, invasive species, pollution, and other forms of land destruction, which have already "significantly altered" 75 percent of the Earth's land surface and destroyed 85 percent of the world's wetlands. Though caused in part by climate change, the biodiversity crisis is its own distinct problem and it poses an existential threat to human civilization.

Read the full article on the extinction crisis by Jimmy Tobias at Pacific Standard.