Back Biodiversity 100: Save our Wildlife at Nagoya Biodiversity Conference COP10
Geschreven op 11-10-2010 - Erik van Erne. Geplaatst in Iets anders
In a few weeks, unless we can rouse sufficient public indignation to avert it, a widespread suspicion that humanity is incapable of looking after this planet will be confirmed.
The world’s governments will meet at Nagoya in Japan to discuss the catastrophic decline of life on the planet. The outcome is expected to be as tragic and as impotent as the collapse of last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen.
We cannot accept this. We cannot stand back and watch while the wonders of this world are sacrificed to crass carelessness and short-termism. So, a few weeks ago, the Guardian launched the Biodiversity 100 campaign to prod governments into action. We asked the public and some of the world’s top ecologists to help us compile a list of 100 specific tasks that will show whether or not governments are serious about protecting biodiversity. Each task would be aimed at a government among the G20 nations, and they would be asked to sign up to it at Nagoya. Unless something changes, governments intend to decide that wild species and wild places will not be allowed to compete with special interest groups or industrial lobbyists, however narrow their interests or perverse their desires. Wildlife doesn’t fund political parties, control newspapers or threaten to take its business elsewhere. As soon as money can be made from its destruction, it goes.
Governments’ complacency about biodiversity is matched, so far, by the public’s. Perhaps it’s issue fatigue, perhaps there’s a sense — as the topic doesn’t receive much coverage — that someone, somewhere must be taking care of it. Well they aren’t. Last week Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, admitted that the 2010 deadline for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss has been missed. In fact, as a study in Science earlier this year suggested, the commitment governments made in 2002 appears to have had no significant impact at all.
Instead of learning from this failure, they seem intent on repeating it. At last week’s UN General Assembly they discussed a set of unenforceable good intentions. In effect, the new plan shifts the 2010 targets to 2020, without proposing any better means of meeting them. The world’s wildlife is being washed away on a tide of platitudes. Source: Our World 2.0
Biodiversity 100: Lists of 100 specific actions per continent. The Americas’ list includes preservation of rainforest dominates in South America, plus the threatened woodland caribou in Canada and vaquita in Mexico. Recommendations for Australia focus on invasive plants and fish that damage native populations.
Some of Asia‘s pressing issues are shark finning, South Korea’s four rivers project and China’s wildlife protection legislation. Europe‘s list includes a new water policy for Turkey, better protection for tigers in Russia and restoring bee populations in the UK.
2010: UN International Year of Biodiversity - Biodiversity We are all in This Together - EEA Signals 2010: Biodiversity, Climate Change and You - United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity: Nagoya Biodiversity Conference COP10
