Governments Fail To Meet 2010 Biodiversity Goal
Posted on: Thursday, 2 July 2009, 10:50 CDT
The International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday that pledges to roll back the threat to biodiversity by 2010 are beginning to seem out of reach, AFP reported.
Jean-Christophe Vie of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) told AFP the goal set by UN parties under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010 would clearly not be met.
The Swiss-based IUCN issued a report on Thursday saying Earth was hurtling towards a mass extinction.
It said that 869 out of 44,838 species on the IUCN's famous "Red List" are considered to be extinct or extinct in the wild.
It also showed that if 290 critically endangered species that are tagged as possibly extinct are included in the list, it raises the tally to 1,159.
Issues such as habitat loss, fungal infection and other risks could potentially wipe out a third of amphibians around the world.
Extinction threatens more than one in eight birds, with Brazil, Indonesia and oceanic islands in the lead. Almost a quarter of mammals in Asia, particularly hunted species, are in danger of a similar threat.
The IUCN said that overall, a minimum of 16,928 species are threatened with extinction.
The group said in a statement: “Considering that only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million described species have been analyzed, this number is a gross underestimate, but it does provide a useful snapshot of what is happening to all forms of life on Earth.”
The IUCN report titled “Wildlife in a Changing World” was released before the government deadline to evaluate the current progress of the 2010 target.
Vie urged governments to tackle the biodiversity crisis with the same urgency with which they tackled its economic crisis.
“Economies are utterly dependent on species diversity. We need them all, in large numbers. We quite literally cannot afford to lose them,” he said.
He said that governments should put as much effort, if not more, into saving nature as they do into addressing the economic and financial sectors.
"It's much more severe than the economic crisis or the bank crisis," Vie said. "You can lose a core industry but you can rebuild one. In nature, if you lose it, you lose it, and you're losing a lot of capital that cannot be replaced."
He warned that biodiversity continues to decline and next year no one will dispute that.
“It's happening everywhere.”
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On the Net:
- International Union for Conservation of Nature
- Wildlife in a Changing World (pdf)
- Image Courtesy Wikipedia
Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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