Bye Bye Biodiversity

An international commitment to stop biodivesity loss will not be met

In April 2002, over a hundred world ministers made a commitment at the 6th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at the Hague to "achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth."

Well, that's not going happen.

"We will certainly miss the target for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 and therefore also miss the 2015 environmental targets within the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to improve health and livelihoods for the world's poorest and most vulnerable people," says Georgina Mace of Imperial College, London, and Vice-Chair of Diversitas, according to a press release issued by the the international biodiversity science program.

This week, Diversitas is convening a landmark biodiversity conference in Cape Town.

"It is hard to image a more important priority than protecting the ecosystem services underpinned by biodiversity," says Prof. Mace. "Biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate."

"Yet changes to ecosystems and losses of biodiversity have continued to accelerate. Since 1992, even the most conservative estimates agree that an area of tropical rainforest greater than the size of California has been converted mostly for food and fuel. Species extinction rates are at least 100 times those in pre-human times and are expected to continue to increase."

The United States has spent a good deal of money trying to protect endangered wildlife -- in 2007, that sum was over $1.5 billion, according to John Platt in a Scientific American article. The Chinook salmon alone received $165 million towards its conservation.

But, as Platt points out, "This is all just a drop in the bucket of the total funds required to protect endangered species."

Professor Mace believes however that "the situation is not hopeless. There are many steps available that would help but we cannot dawdle. Meaningful action should have started years ago. The next best time is now."

GET INVOLVED

• Support the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Countdown 2010 to save the world's biodiversity
• Support the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
  
• Sign a petition to the United Nations to show your support of biodiversity

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image: Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (credit: Zureks)