GENEVA: An invasive beetle has driven North America’s most widespread ash tree towards extinction, conservationists said on Thursday, also warning of dramatic declines among several African antelope species.

In an update to its “Red List” of threatened species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said six of North America’s most prominent ash species were now “critically endangered” — just one step from becoming extinct.

The species are being destroyed by the invasive and fast-moving emerald ash borer beetle, which arrived in the northern state of Michigan from Asia in the late 1990s via infested shipping pallets.

It has already wiped out tens of millions of trees throughout the United States and Canada, and can kill off virtually an entire forest of ash within six years, the IUCN said.

“Their decline, which will likely affect over 80 per cent of the trees, will dramatically change the composition of both wild and urban forests,” Murphy Westwood, of IUCN’s Global Tree Specialist Group, said in a statement.

Three of the endangered species — the green ash, white ash and black ash — are the most dominant ash trees in the US, comprising nearly nine billion trees in forested lands.

The white ash is also one of the most valuable timber trees in North America and is widely used to make furniture, baseball bats and hockey sticks.

IUCN said a warming climate meant the emerald ash borer was now thriving in places that once were too cold, warning that it was “impossible to know how far it could spread in the future”.

The North American ash trees are among more than 25,000 species deemed by the Red List to be threatened with extinction.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2017