World will miss 2010 target to stem biodiversity loss

The world will miss its agreed target to stem biodiversity loss by next year, according to 600 experts from around the world who convened in Cape Town in October for a landmark conference devoted to biodiversity science.

The goal was agreed at the 6^th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in April 2003. Some 123 world ministers committed to “achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth”.

“We will certainly miss the target for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 and therefore also miss the 2015 environmental targets within the UN Millennium Development Goals to improve health and livelihoods for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people,” said Georgina Mace of Imperial College, London, and Vice-Chair of the international DIVERSITAS program.

“It is hard to image a more important priority than protecting the ecosystem services underpinned by biodiversity,” Prof Mace said. “Biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate.”

“Yet changes to ecosystems and losses of biodiversity have continued to accelerate. Species extinction rates are at least 100 times those in pre-human times and are expected to continue to increase.”

However, she added that “the situation is not hopeless. There are many steps available that would help but we cannot dawdle. Meaningful action should have started years ago. The next best time is now.”

The conference, opened by UN Under-Secretary-General Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UNEP, called for new and more science-based targets.

“A great deal of awareness-raising is still needed with respect to the planetary threat posed by the loss of so many species. The focus of biodiversity science today, though, is evolving from describing problems to policy relevant problem solving,” said Stanford University Prof Hal Mooney, DIVERSITAS Chair.

“Experts are rising to the immense challenge, developing interdisciplinary, science-based solutions to the crisis while building new mechanisms to accelerate progress. Biodiversity scientists are becoming more engaged in policy debates.”

Five roundtables between top science and policy specialists were held on key issues such as efforts to create a science-based global biodiversity observing system (GEO-BON) to improve both coverage and consistency in observations at ground level and via remote sensing.

DIVERSITAS vice-chair Dr Bob Scholes, who heads GEO-BON said: “GEO-BON will help give us a comprehensive baseline against which scientists can track biodiversity trends and evaluate the status of everything from genes to ecosystem services. The lack of such information became acutely apparent during preparation of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and in formulating the CBD’s 2010 targets.”

Others, meanwhile, are creating an international mechanism to unify the voice of the biodiversity science community to better inform policy making, its function akin to that of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).