SciDev.Net

This special 2005 issue of CBD News, the newsletter of the UN biodiversity convention, focuses on the role of protected areas in meeting a global target to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss before 2010.

Nearly 12 per cent of the Earth's land surface is now under protected status, though it is widely acknowledged that much of this land amounts to what are known as "paper parks" — national parks that exist on paper, but not in any practical sense.

This report includes updates and reports from protected areas all over the world, as well as views and opinions from international donors such as the Global Environment Facility as well as conservation agencies such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International, both of which are at the vanguard of moves to increase the amount of land surface area that has protected status.

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems faster and more extensively than in any period in human history. That is one of four main conclusions to emerge from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a comprehensive review of the impact of human activities on the state of the world’s biodiversity.

Changes to ecosystems are due largely to rapidly growing demands for food, freshwater, timber, fibre, and fuel, the report says. The result has been a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth, it adds.

The other main conclusions to emerge from the report are:

• Changes to ecosystems have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved at growing costs. These costs include the degradation of many ecosystem services, increased risks of abrupt changes, and increased poverty for some groups of people.

• Degradation of ecosystem services could get significantly worse during the next 50 years and is a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals10.4.

• Reversing ecosystem degradation while meeting increasing demands for ecosystem services will be a challenge. This challenge can be partially met in the future under scenarios involving significant changes to policies, institutions, and practices. However, these required actions will have to be substantial when compared to the actions currently taken.

Coral reefs are the most diverse of all marine ecosystems and they provide economic benefits to the growing number of people who live in low-lying coastal areas. Research has suggested that climate change poses a threat to these complex ecosystems.

This report includes a thorough introduction to the ecology of coral reefs as a background.  It then provides an overview of the 'regular' stresses to which coral reefs are exposed, and how climate change affects them additionally.  The report suggests that the crisis affecting coral ecosystems must be understood as a combination of interacting stresses and says any attempts for remediation have to consider this.

The report provides a thorough yet accessible introduction and a comprehensive assessment of the stresses affecting coral reef systems. It will primarily be useful to someone who is new to the field.

Readers will have to download the report in pdf format.

Conservation groups in developed countries have embarked on an initiative aimed at improving how biodiversity issues are communicated to the wider public in both developed and developing countries.

The initiative is aimed both at making it easier for people to grasp what are often complex issues in conservation, but at the same time helping them to understand that an improvement in the rate of loss of species depends to a large extent on ordinary people adopting a more biodiversity-friendly lifestyle.

A consultation is underway, coordinated by Joy Hyvarinen of the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Will Rogowski of the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, UK.

Assuring Biodiversity: a brand-building approach, was commissioned for the initiative and published in May 2004. The author Tim Kitchin of the marketing and public relations consultancy Glasshouse Partnership, argues that “existing efforts to conserve biodiversity are hampered by a fragmented and confused communication”. He says that conservation groups need to treat biodiversity as a ‘brand’ and that “if biodiversity was better understood, it would be better protected”.

The UN Millennium Project was established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to recommend ways of achieving the Millennium Developemnt Goals - reducing the number of people living in poverty before 2015. The project is divided into 10 task forces. Task force 6 is responsible for environmental sustainability, which includes biodiversity conservation.

This report serves as the task force's official background document. It explores a number of key issues including: why biodiversity and ecosystem services matter; what are the key areas of environmental degradation; what are the causes; why are current conservation efforts not working; what might be the elements of a framework for action; and what is the economic value of biodiversity.

An interim report will be published towards the end of 2003.

This report reviews some of the main scientific achievements in discovering the extent of global biodiversity decline. It also reviews some of the major scientific initiatives to improve understanding of biodiversity issues that have been put in place since the 1992 Earth Summit.

It is one of 11 reports prepared by the International Council for Science to coincide with the World Summit on Sustainable Development that was held in Johannesburg in August 2002. Other reports in the series tackle issues such as biotechnology, climate change, energy, and traditional knowledge.

Conservation organisations are lobbying hard for a new international law on protected areas. Parks Canada commissioned the World Conservation Union to write this set of papers exploring the scope of such a law. The papers look at different possible legal arrangements for protected areas as well as who might provide funding. The papers will be discussed at the forthcoming World Parks Congress in Durban in September 2003.

Compiled from the archive of India's fornightly Down to Earth magazine, Global Environmental Negotiations is an impressive two-volume book that provides comprehensive information on the history and prospects of all UN multilateral environmental agreements, including the conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification.

The volumes are particularly valuable in that Down to Earth is perhaps the only southern-based periodical that has been closely following global environmental issues for well over a decade; they are intended as aids to negotiators and civil society across the world.

Published on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the biodiversity convention in 2002, Governing Global Biodiversity is a compilation of researched essays on the history and evolution of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and is aimed a decision-makers.

Desiree McGraw's chapter on how the Convention came to be agreed is full of insights and perhaps among the best available on this subject. Equally impressive is Catherine Potvin's essay that compares indigenous peoples' views on the value of biodiversity with those of the scientific community.

[Ashgate Publishing, US$80]

This is an invaluable 52-page online guide to navigating the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the official UN funding mechanism for environmental projects. GEF has spent close to $2 billion in its first decade of operations and biodiversity is one of its five focal areas.

GEF is also controversial among NGOs, partly because of the close involvement of the World Bank in its grant-making decisions, as well as the ambiguous nature of the idea of 'incremental costs' that underpins all of its financing.

This guide advises organisations seeking GEF funding not to despair at the first hurdle. It argues that the journey through GEF's cumbersome bureaucracy is worth the effort, as few organisations - if any - can match its commitment, or level of funding, for conservation projects.

The Living Planet Report is a periodic update on the state of the world's ecosystems produced by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

WWF have developed what they call the Living Planet Index. The index is based on trends over the past 30 years in populations of hundreds of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish.

Between 1970 and 2000, the forest species population index declined by about 15 per cent, the marine index fell by about 35 per cent, while the freshwater index dropped 55 per cent over the 30-year period.

This letter to Nature outlines argues against the idea that ecological criteria alone should be used to drive conservation strategies - a blueprint put forward by the non-governmental campaigning organisation, Conservation International.

Paul Jepson, a geographer at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, argues that fencing-off protected areas is not a people-friendly solution to conserving biodiversity. Based on data from Indonesia, he says that local communities are often resistant to the idea of protecting areas as 'hotspots' as they face losing homes and livelihoods if they are moved off land they have been occupying often for centuries.

This is one of several research articles that gives scientific weight to the idea that governments should prioritise the protection of 25 regions of the world – dubbed 'hotspots' – where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat. The authors argue that in this areas threatened endemic species should be free from human activities.

The article’s lead author and main proponent of the hotspots thesis is Norman Myers who is at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He famously calls this approach the 'silver bullet' strategy for conservation. Myers' co-authors are from the NGO Conservation International and its offshoot, the Centre for Applied Biodiversity Science.

Friends of the Earth International has Twenty-two brief case studies on the impact of corporate activity on biodiversity around the globe. Most of the examples focus on what happens when governments and businesses plan large development projects which take away the livelihoods of poor rural communities. These are often livelihoods which depend to a large extent on the surrounding biodiversity.

Examples include communities on Papua New Guinea’s Fly and Ok Tedi rivers who are losing their staple food, the sago palm, because of pollution from a nearby mine; or the The Ogoni people of the Niger Delta who can no longer safely eat their staples of periwinkles, oysters and crabs because of repeated oil spills in nearby mangrove forests.

This is a concise summary from the World Resources Institute of relevant articles in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that highlight the relationship between biodiversity and climate change. The Kyoto Protocol formally recognises the dual nature of forests - they are both part of the problem and part of the solution to climate change.

The article says that forest conversion has contributed an estimated 30 per cent of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, and future projections show large emissions from deforestation. However, protecting, restoring, and improving the management of forests can help slow climate change.

The world-famous annual Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union is now into its fifth decade. The list highlights species at risk of global extinction. It is based on the collective data-gathering of thousands of scientists.

The website contains a database that can be searched by country or by taxonomic group. For first-time users, the FAQ and Summary Statistics sections are a good place to begin. Summary Statistics compares the state of biodiversity in selected regions and among selected species between 1996 and 2002. The site also contains an image library.

Published by the United Nations biodiversity convention, the Global Biodiversity Outlook is a periodic assessment of the state of the world’s biodiversity, which includes an analysis of the steps being taken to ensure that the convention is being adopted in its member countries.

The report also serves as a useful guide to the convention itself; provides information on what individual countries are doing to protect their biodiversity, and includes a list of biodiversity projects that are being funded by the Global Environment Facility.

The author draws on various perspectives presented in the literature on intellectual property rights, food, farming, biodiversity, and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and related agreements. He highlights the policy questions for developing countries by TRIPS, examines the key ethical, economic, environmental and social issues surrounding its provisions, and considers the possible contributions of overseas development assistance.

The report concludes that the TRIPS agreement could either undermine food security and biodiversity or enhance it, depending upon the relative effects of the various provisions — the costs and benefits are not clear cut nor are they likely to be equally distributed. The author recommends that until the influence of intellectual property rights on agriculture and biodiversity are better understood, flexibility within the TRIPS agreement should be retained.

The paper is written for policy makers, primarily in developing countries, in agriculture, environment and trade and those responsible for ensuring policy coherence across government departments.