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2010-05-10 12:24:41
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News
The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a
major UN report is to say .
The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) warns that some ecosystems may
soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.
Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of
watercourses and mass coral reef death.
Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target
of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.
Continue reading the main story
Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without
biodiversity
Achim Steiner UN Environment Programme
"The news is not good," said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
"We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history -
extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background
rate."
The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals,
reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and
2006, the UN says.
Seeing red
The 2010 target of significantly curbing the global rate of biodiversity loss
was agreed at the Johannesburg summit in 2002.
It has been clear for a while that it would not be met.
WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY?
Continue reading the main story
sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems
and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity
within species, between species and of ecosystems"
But GBO-3 concludes that none of the 21 subsidiary targets set at the same time
are being met either, at least not on a global basis.
These include measures such as curbing the rate of habitat loss and
degradation, protecting at least 10% of the Earth's ecological regions,
controlling the spread of invasive species and making sure that international
trade does not take any species towards extinction.
No government submitting reports to the convention on biodiversity group claims
to have completely met the 2010 target.
While progress is being made in some regions, the global failure means an
ever-growing number of species are on the Red List of Threatened Species.
"Twenty-one percent of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12% of
all known birds (and)... 27% of reef-building corals assessed... are threatened
with extinction," said Bill Jackson, deputy director general of the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which maintains the
Red List.
"If the world made equivalent losses in share prices, there would be a rapid
response and widespread panic."
Costing the Earth
The relationship between nature loss and economic harm is much more than just
figurative, the UN believes.
An ongoing project known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
is attempting to quantify the monetary value of various services that nature
provides for us, such as purifying water and air, protecting coasts from storms
and maintaining wildlife for ecotourism.
Coral reef Loss of coral reefs will reduce humanity's supply of seafood
The rationale is that when such services disappear or are degraded, they have
to be replaced out of society's coffers.
TEEB has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion,
dwarfing costs of the banking crisis.
"Many economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals,
plants and other lifeforms and their role in healthy and functioning
ecosystems," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment
Programme (Unep).
"Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without
biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the
truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over
nine billion people by 2050."
The more that ecosystems become degraded, the UN says, the greater the risk
that they will be pushed "over the edge" into a new stable state of much less
utility to humankind.
For example, freshwater systems polluted with excess agricultural fertiliser
will suffocate with algae, killing off fish and making water unfit for human
consumption.
The launch of GBO-3 comes as governments begin two weeks of talks in Nairobi
aimed at formulating new measures to tackle global biodiversity loss that can
be adopted at October's Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Japan.