UN meeting aims to agree species-saving initiative

AN international conference aimed at preserving the planet’s diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins today in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poornations that have stalled UN climate talks.

Seventeen years after the UN Convention on Biological Diversity was founded, it has yet to achieve any major initiative to slow the alarming rate of species extinction and loss of ecosystems, despite global goals set in 2002 to make major improvement by this year.

Frogs and other amphibians are most at risk of disappearing, coral reefs are the species deteriorating most rapidly and nearly a quarter of all plant species are threatened, according to the convention, which is convening the two-week meeting.

A key task facing delegates will be to hammer out a set of 20 strategic goals for the next decade. Unless steps are taken to reverse the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, scientists warn that the rate of extinction will climb and natural habitats will be degraded or destroyed, contributing to climate change and threatening agricultural production, fish stocks and access to clean water.

Scientists estimate that the Earth is losing species 100 to 1,000 times the historical average, upsetting the intricately interconnected natural world. Prominent insect biologist EO Wilson at Harvard University argues that a man-made environmental crisis is pushing the Earth toward its sixth big extinction phase, the greatest since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

However, some battle lines have already formed between developed and developing nations over the convention’s strategic mission statement – whether to take action to halt or simply slow the loss of biodiversity by 2020 – and finding a way to equitably share the benefits of genetic resources, such as plants native to poor countries that have been converted into lucrative drug products in the West.

The convention, which will bring together 8,000 delegates from 193 member nations in Nagoya, 270 kilometres west of Tokyo, was born out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. So far, the convention has failed to meet a series of goals set eight years ago to preserve the world’s biodiversity against overfishing, deforestation and pollution.

Conservation groups attribute part of that to a lack of political will and funding. They also say that some of the goals until now have been fuzzy, and partly blame their own failure to make a convincing case that action is needed.

“We haven’t been able to successfully get across a message that our society and economies ultimately depend on this biodiversity,” said Bill Jackson, deputy director-general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “We have to fix the problem within the next 10 years.”

Host country Japan, meanwhile, will be looking to this conference as a chance to portray itself as a protector of biodiversity after helping kill off many of the measures at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.