'We are destroying life on earth,' UN meet says
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COMMENTS 
Species are becoming extinct at 100-1,000 times the natural rate, key habitats are disappearing, and more and more water and land are being used to support people, says a UN meeting aimed at finding solutions to the world’s environmental crisis
The world cannot afford to allow nature’s riches to disappear, the United Nations said recently, at the start of a major meeting in Nagoya, Japan, to combat losses in animal and plant species that underpin livelihoods and economies. The UN cited the worst extinction rate since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, saying it’s a crisis that needs to be addressed by governments, businesses and communities.
A UN-backed study this month said global environmental damage caused by human activity in 2008 totalled $6.6 trillion, equivalent to 11% of global gross domestic product. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting is discussing why governments failed to curb these trends.
Delegates from nearly 200 countries are being asked to agree to new 2020 targets after governments largely failed to meet a 2010 target of achieving a significant reduction in biological diversity losses, a goal set at the last biodiversity conference in 2002.
Jochen Flasbarth, president of the German Federal Environment Agency, and outgoing chairman of the convention, said the world had failed to even slow the loss of biodiversity. “We are still losing the richness, the beauty, and the natural capital of our planet,” he said. “Virgin forests of the size of Greece are cut down every year.”
Incoming chairman Ryu Matsumoto, Japan’s environment minister, warned the world was about to reach a threshold where the loss of biodiversity would become irreversible. “We’re now close to a tipping point on biodiversity,” he said. “We may cross that in the next 10 years.”
Despite the UN’s fear that biodiversity may be at risk, scientists over the past decade have identified new species at an unprecedented rate. The 2008 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) study ‘First Contact in the Greater Mekong’ reported that 1,068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 -- averaging two new species a week.
The Census of Marine Life -- an ambitious 10-year project to catalogue the diversity of the world’s oceans -- recently concluded, having identified more than 6,000 potentially new ocean species.
The two-week UN meeting faces an uphill battle as it tries to institute sweeping steps to protect and restore ecosystems such as forests, rivers, coral reefs and the oceans that are vital for an ever-growing human population. Issues of funding will be a key problem delegates will need to iron out -- both, who pays for the programme and who reaps the rewards of the world’s biodiversity.
Developing nations say more funding is needed from developed countries to share the effort in saving nature. Much of the world’s remaining biological diversity is in developing nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and central Africa.
“Especially for countries with their economies in transition, we need to be sure where the (financial) resources are,” Eng B T Baya, director-general of Tanzania’s National Environment Management Council, said.
“It’s not helping us if you set a lot of strategic targets and there is no ability or resources to implement them,” Baya said. Poorer nations want funding to protect species and ecosystems to be ramped up 100-fold from about $3 billion now.
“What the world most wants from Nagoya are the agreements that will stop the continuing dramatic loss in the world’s living wealth and the continuing erosion of our life-support systems,” said Jim Leape, WWF International’s director-general.
The WWF and Greenpeace called for nations to set aside large areas of linked land and ocean reserves. “If our planet is to sustain life on earth in the future and be rescued from the brink of environmental destruction, we need action by governments to protect our oceans and forests and to halt biodiversity loss,” said Nathalie Rey, Greenpeace International’s oceans policy adviser.
Another area of contention is how to deal with the economic benefits of biodiversity, notably the success of big pharmaceutical companies. The conference will try to set rules on how and when companies and researchers can use genes from plants or animals that originate in countries mainly in the developing world.
Developing nations want a fairer deal in sharing the wealth of their ecosystems and back the draft treaty, or “access and benefit-sharing” (ABS) protocol. For poorer nations, the protocol could unlock billions of dollars -- but some drug makers are wary of extra costs, squeezing investment for research while complicating procedures such as applications for patents.
Conservation groups say failure to agree on the ABS pact could derail the talks in Nagoya, including agreement on the 2020 target that will also set goals to protect fish stocks and phase out incentives harmful to biodiversity.
Before the start of the two-week meeting, Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said: “The ABS protocol will be a future investment for the human family as a whole.”
Governments first agreed back in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, that the ongoing loss of biodiversity needed attention. This agreement acquired teeth 10 years later, at the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development. But since 2002, most measures relating to the health of the natural world have gone downhill rather than up.
The majority of species studied over the period are moving closer to extinction rather than further away, while important natural habitats like forests, wetlands, rivers and coral reefs continue to shrink or be disturbed.
“Since the 1960s, we’ve doubled our food consumption, our water consumption,” said Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). “The world’s population has doubled, and the economy has grown six-old; in 2050, there will be 9.2 billion people on the planet.”
Source: http://www.foxnews.com, October 19, 2010
Reuters, October 19, 2010
BBC, October 19, 2010