Species disappear as consensus eludes on biodiversity

Amid the howling motorcades, the scrums of burly security guards and the buzz of countless meetings around the United Nations in recent days, the venerable Bun Saluth, a Cambodian Buddhist monk with a shaved head, stood out with his vivid saffron robes, his unassuming manner — and for taking what some might call tree hugging to an entirely different level.

Using the holy induction ceremony customarily reserved for Buddhist monks, Bun Saluth ordained individual trees and eventually huge swaths of woodland, lending a sacred aura to thousands of acres in Cambodia. He inspired villagers and ultimately the government to protect them from rampant logging, thereby regenerating a depleted forest.

In doing so, Bun Saluth accomplished something that has eluded dozens of world leaders who gather regularly at the UN, including the annual general debate that ended last Wednesday. Despite about two decades of conferences, conventions and commitments, the earth’s biological diversity steadily erodes as ecosystems suffer and species die out.
Consensus that something needs to happen has been relatively easy. But the fight over what to do — and who pays for it — has dragged on for years.

As global issues go, biodiversity exists in the shadow of climate change, facing similar problems but attracting a fraction of the attention despite concerted efforts. (In case you had not noticed, the UN declared 2010 the Year of Biodiversity.)

Almost every UN member state is party to the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, the holdouts being the United States, Andorra and the Vatican, UN officials said.
But like climate change, efforts to move forward have jammed along the well-worn fault line separating developed from developing nations.

The three pillars of the convention are conservation, sustainable development and fair use of resources. But the argument over patenting and paying royalties for those resources, among other issues, has fuelled a protracted fight. It will play out next in late October at a conference in Nagoya, Japan.

The debate is so entrenched that a group of 17 nations, including heavyweights like Brazil, India and China, have formed an alliance with an unwieldy name, The Group of Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries, to combat what they call ‘biopiracy.’

“Countries like Brazil and India are victims of biopiracy over many decades and we have to protect our bioresources, we have to protect our traditional knowledge,” said Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister.

Bringing much of the developing world along, the Megadiverse accuse richer nations and their corporations of colonial practices — pillaging natural resources and indigenous knowledge for medicine, cosmetics and the like without paying royalties. Rather than signing off on a universal protocol governing access and sharing the benefits, some western nations have said agreements should be negotiated piecemeal.

The problem, according to UN officials and scientists, is that in the absence of a global agreement, nations are gradually passing one restrictive national law after another, to the point that a plant or insect that might help combat a scourge on a different continent can no longer be obtained. When Kenya wanted to combat an Asian fruit fly in recent years, for example, Sri Lanka blocked the export of the natural predator, said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

Lifesaving medicines
Beyond that, scientists say, possibly lifesaving medicines or knowledge might disappear forever. Such losses are likely to worsen because the factors driving them — changing habitat, pollution, overexploitation, invasive alien species and climate change — are intensifying or at least not diminishing, scientists say.

About 1.9 million species have been identified, out of what scientists estimate is a total of around 15 million species on earth. (Microbes account for the anonymous bulk.) There is a spectrum of opinion about the broad risks facing species. Under the natural order of things, some scientists argue, 15 species would go extinct annually. Instead, they are disappearing at a rate estimated at 100 to 1,000 times that. Scientists dub the current loss the Sixth Great Extinction Event. Number Five was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs perished.

But the loss often suffers from an out-of-sight, out-of-mind quality, so scientists try to draw attention to the possible fate of highly visible creatures like the polar bear.
Dr Eric Chivian of Harvard Medical School points out that polar bears can sleep for months without losing bone mass or even urinating. Studying them might reveal secrets that help humans cope with osteoporosis or kidney failure. But if they die out because their once frozen environment melts, he says, all that could be lost.

It is just one example of how biodiversity and climate change are intertwined, scientists say.

“Every degree centigrade the planet warms will lead automatically to a 10 per cent loss in known species,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Even if the UN climate change agreement seeks to limit the temperature rise to two degrees, he said, “It is a death sentence for 20 per cent of known species.”

But as with climate change, officials and biodiversity advocates are losing faith in obtaining a ‘big bang’ agreement that wraps all global efforts into one package.
Instead they hope piecemeal efforts by individual countries will eventually reach a critical mass. The UN and its allies try to spur that trend in various ways — one is a series of studies assigning an economic value to efforts like forest preservation.

But developing countries are demanding that richer nations underwrite their conservation efforts.

“It seems that the standing forest and the wealth of Suriname’s biodiversity are being taken for granted by the global community as there are no structures in place to provide incentives to continue on the path of sustainability,” Desire Delano Bouterse, president of Suriname, warned the General Assembly.

Poor people who depend on nature for sustenance are likely to suffer the most from the loss of biodiversity, officials say, so they are often the most invested in preserving it. Officials hope that by singling out local projects — Bun Saluth’s Monks Community Forest in Cambodia, a women’s cooperative in Senegal that has helped bring back species of shellfish and a Vietnamese village that is preserving bamboo were all recognised at an awards ceremony in New York — the grassroots will inspire politicians to act.

“The people who best know how to shape and drive development are still the people listened to least,” said Steiner of the UN. “We are erasing the hard disk of life before we have even begun to understand the value it represents.”