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The spoon-billed sandpiper, three-toed sloth and a long-beaked echidna named after Sir David Attenborough are among the 100 most endangered species in the world, according to a new study.

The list of at-risk species has been published as conservationists warn that rare mammals, plants and fungi are being sacrificed as their habitats are appropriated for human use. More than 8,000 scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC) helped compile the list of species closest to extinction, which was published by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

A new report for the European Union warns that tough new regulations are required for the shale gas industry because of the high risk it poses to human health and the environment.

The EC study, 'Impacts of shale gas and shale oil extraction on the environment and human health', the most comprehensive analysis yet of the shale gas sector, says that drilling for shale gas poses a "high risks", worse than those posed by other fossil fuels, EEM reported.

Shell has been accused of "stock-car racing recklessness" after apparently undertaking only the most limited testing of a key piece of equipment aimed at preventing a Gulf of Mexico-style blowout during its controversial drilling in the Arctic.

Documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest field-testing of a containment dome took place over two hours on 25 and 26 June. The dome, known as a "capping stack", would be dropped over any stricken wellhead.

Short for “hydraulic fracturing,” fracking is the process by which gas companies access underground deposits of natural gas, called shales. Millions of gallons of “fracking fluid”—that’s water and sand mixed with hundreds of chemicals—are pumped deep into the earth’s crust, breaking up rock and freeing natural gas reserves.

Natural gas is being marketed as a clean, green alternative to foreign-oil dependency; this year, the International Energy Agency found that carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by four hundred and fifty tons, the result of an increase in the use of natural gas instead of coal. But since the inception of widespread fracking in 1997, horror stories have slowly entered the national conscience: illnesses coinciding with contaminated wells, citizens who can light their tap water on fire, pet and livestock deaths, exploding houses.

The vital tasks carried out by tiny "engineers" like earthworms that recycle waste and bees that pollinate crops are under threat because one fifth of the world's spineless creatures may be at risk of extinction, a study showed on Friday.

The rising human population is putting ever more pressure on the "spineless creatures that rule the world" including slugs, spiders, jellyfish, lobsters, corals, and bugs such as beetles and butterflies, it said.

During the early 1970s, before Sean Lennon was born to John and Yoko, the couple bought a farm in Delaware County, three hours from their home at the Dakota in New York City. As a toddler, Sean remembers one of the goats chewing on his blue jeans.

Today, that property near the Catskills belongs to him and sits within potential drilling territory above the sprawling Marcellus Shale, where Governor Andrew Cuomo might reverse the state's ban on hydraulic fracturing – known as "fracking" – for natural gas.

Ono and Lennon, who founded Artists Against Fracking in July, gathered the coalition on Wednesday at New York's Paley Center for Media and called on Governor Cuomo to discuss developing renewable alternatives to wells, some of which have been linked to leaking methane into the groundwater.