Environment

Environment

Worldwide Biodiversity Preservation

If the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) popularized the idea of global warming, a counterpart in biodiversity and ecosystem preservation is now being pushed internationally.
An Inter-governmental Platform or Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is being established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in a move to save the remaining global biodiversity in a regime of protection that likewise promotes economic gain.
“The value of services generated by the world’s 100,000 protected areas is estimated to be worth over $5 trillion annually,” UNEP cited the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity in a statement.
As much as the IPCC has supported mechanisms such as the popular “carbon trading” under the Kyoto Protocol, the IPBES is looking at such capital-generating incentives to boost biodiversity conservation.
“A similar bridge between the scientific and political worlds may be the solution to the decline of the planet’s natural assets.”
The IPBES may be engaged in a worldwide education work such as making plain and simple to most people the role of animals, plants, insects, and microbes in the ecosystem—how they act to purify water or keep soil fertility.
It should orient consumers on the loss economies suffer from “dead zones” in the sea or in forests and soils as reported in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-4.
“We are facing a serious challenge to nature-based assets. Global GDP (gross domestic product)has more than doubled in the past quarter century. In contrast 60 percent of the world’s ecosystems have been degraded,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.
In the past, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention on Migratory Species, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and the RAMSAR convention on Wetlands have attempted to solve global biodiversity degradation.
But the response has apparently been inadequate or signals a mismatch. These, said UNEP, are some of the consequences of the lack of sufficient program on biodiversity:
• By 2025, close to two billion people are likely to live with absolute water scarcity.
• In West Asia , freshwater availability per person per year has fallen from 1,700 cubic meters (cu.m.) in the 1980s and will decline to 420 cu.m. by 2050,
• Freshwater vertebrates have declined on average by nearly 50 per cent since 1987 and around 30 per cent decline for terrestrial and marine species, and
• In the Caribbean , over 60 per cent of coral reefs are threatened by sediments, pollution and over-fishing.
Alien invasive species have becoming the most damaging to ecosystems with loss estimated at $140 billion yearly. In the Cape Floral Kingdom in South Africa , the fight against invasive tree species is costing it $40 million yearly.
Moreover, these are the value of biodiversity:
• Mangroves are valued at more than $900,000 per square kilometer (sq.km.) and coral reefs at $100,000 to $600,000 per sq.m.,
• Reefs in Indonesia are worth $1 million per sq. km. based on the cost of maintaining sandy beaches,
• An intact wetland in Canada is worth $6,000 a hectare (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) versus $2,000 a hectare for one cleared for intensive agriculture,
• Pollination services of insects such as bees and animals like bats are worth up to $90 billion annually, and
• The value of the timber and fuel-wood from a forest is worth less than a third when compared with the value of their services such as water-shed protection and recreation to the absorption of pollutants like greenhouse gases. end-----------------