Only a few countries — including France, Guatemala and Britain — have adopted strategies to tackle threat, experts say
OSLO/SINGAPORE – Many nations need to do more to slow extinctions of animals
and plants under United Nations targets for 2020 that would also save the world
economy billions of dollars a year, UN experts say.
Only a few countries — including France, Guatemala and Britain — have so far
adopted new national plans to tackle threats such as pollution or climate
change in line with a sweeping pact agreed in Japan in 2010.
“There is a lot more to do,” David Cooper, head of the scientific, technical
and technological unit at the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) in Montreal, told Reuters by phone.
Almost 200 nations will meet in Hyderabad, India, from Oct. 8-19 to review
progress toward goals to protect life on earth that UN reports say is suffering
the biggest wave of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years
ago.
Governments agreed in 2010 to 20 targets including phasing out damaging
subsidies and expanding protected areas, for instance to save valuable coral
reefs that are nurseries for fish or to slow deforestation from the Congo to
the Amazon.
“There is substantial progress. Is it fast enough to achieve the targets by
2020 for most of them? Probably not overall,” Cooper said. Biodiversity is
threatened by a projected rise in the human population to 9 billion by 2050
from 7 billion now.
“We need a step up in the activities,” he said as part of a series of
interviews on the outlook for Hyderabad. Biodiversity underpins everything from
food to timber production.
Nations have also been sluggish in ratifying a protocol laying out rules for
access to genetic resources, such as rare tropical plants used in medicines,
and ways to share benefits among companies, indigenous peoples or governments.
So far, 92 nations have signed the Nagoya Protocol but just six have
ratified, well short of the 50 needed for it to gain legal force. The target is
for the protocol to be up and running by 2015.
OVEROPTIMISTIC
“We were a bit too optimistic,” said Valerie Normand, senior program officer
for access and benefit sharing at the CBD, who said the Secretariat had hoped
for it to come into force this year. The Secretariat now expected entry into
force in 2014.
Cooper said many of the targets set for 2020 would save billions of dollars
a year, by ensuring that farming, logging or fishing can be managed
sustainably. Some fisheries, for instance, have been exploited to the point of
collapse.
In Nagoya, experts estimated that annual funding to safeguard biodiversity
totalled about $3 billion a year but some developing countries wanted it raised
to about $300 billion.
“These are big numbers but they are trivial compared to the benefits we are
getting from biodiversity. If we don’t act the costs will be very much
greater,” Cooper said.
Among concerns, 32 per cent of livestock breeds are under threat of
extinction within the next 20 years, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
says. And 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been
lost since 1900.
“Because we don’t really know the full impacts of climate change down the
line, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of growing
conditions around the world. It’s just safer for us to have a lot of these
other varieties in our pocket,” said David Ainsworth, spokesman of the CBD
Secretariat.
Cooper said the pace of extinctions among the planet’s estimated 9 million
species — plants, animals from insects to whales but excluding legions of tiny
bacteria — was perhaps 100 times the background rate estimated in fossil
records.
“If you project the rates into the future, the rest of the century, they are
likely to be 100 times larger still,” he said. The rising human population
threatens ever more habitats with expanding cities, farms and roads.
Among goals set in 2010 were to increase protected areas for wildlife to 17
per cent of the world’s land area by 2020 and to raise marine areas to 10 per
cent of those under national control. In 2010, respective sizes were 12.7 and 4
per cent.
“I am optimistic” that the goal can be reached, said Sarat Babu Gidda, the
CBD official who oversees protected areas.
By Alister Doyle and David
Fogarty, Reuters
