Environment: The last extinction
Achim Steiner Ahmed Djoghlaf and Sigmar Gabriel
Farmers across Africa are currently engaged in an unequal struggle
against a pestilent fruit fly whose natural home is in Asia. The fly,
first detected in 2004 in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, has since swept
across the continent, decimating mangoes and other crops and devastating
livelihoods.
In a bid to counter the fly, a team from the world-renowned ICIPE
institute in East Africa recently went to Sri Lanka looking for a
natural predator. Researchers have now pinpointed one, which, after
careful screening, has been deemed safe to release into Africa's
environment and appears likely to defeat the unwelcome invader.
But the pioneering work is now on hold, as are the hopes of millions
of farmers for an effective, environmentally friendly answer to the
crisis. Countries in Asia - indeed, countries throughout the developing
world - are simply not exporting their abundant and economically
important genetic resources.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed in 1992,
promised an international regime on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) of
genetic resources. This would allow researchers and companies access to
the developing world's genetic treasure trove in return for a share of
the profits from the products that are then developed.
But brokering the ABS regime has proven elusive, and, in the absence
of an international deal, there has been diminishing access and thus
declining benefit-sharing over the past five or so years. This implies
potentially huge economic, environmental, and social losses to both the
developed and developing world.
These losses include missed opportunities for breakthroughs in
pharmaceuticals, foods, biologically-based materials and processes, and
biological pest controllers like the promising one isolated by ICIPE.
The losses also include failure to conserve the world's dwindling
wildlife and rapidly degrading ecosystems, which are worth trillions of
dollars in terms of life-supporting services.
An intelligently designed ABS regime offers the chance for poorer
countries, which possess the lion's share of the globe's remaining
genetic resources, to begin to be paid properly for maintaining them. It
could also play an important part in meeting the United Nation's
Millennium Development Goals, which include halving poverty by 2015.
Governments from more than 190 countries and an estimated 6,000
delegates have been meeting in Bonn, Germany for the Ninth Meeting of
the Parties to the CBD. Governments have set their sights on securing an
ABS regime by 2010, which is also the deadline agreed at the World
Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, to reduce substantially the
rate of loss of biodiversity.
But accelerated action on many other broad biodiversity-related
fronts is urgently needed. Thirty percent of global fish stocks have
collapsed, up from roughly 15 percent in 1987, and the proportion of
fish stocks classified as over-exploited has doubled, to around 40
percent. Populations of freshwater vertebrates have declined on average
by nearly 50 percent since 1987, while populations of terrestrial and
marine species have fallen by around 30 percent.
In the Caribbean, more than 60 percent of coral reefs are threatened
by sediment, pollution, and over-fishing.
Since the end of the Second World War, more land has been converted
to agricultural use than in the previous two centuries.
Every year, 13 million hectares of tropical forests, which contain up
to 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity, are destroyed.
Roughly 35 percent of mangroves have been destroyed in the last 20
years. But, alongside these sobering facts, the world is also full of
shining and intelligent management. Indeed, protected areas now cover
over 12 percent of the Earth's surface, although the creation of marine
reserves remains woefully low.
For example, Paraguay, which until 2004 had one of the world's
highest rates of deforestation, has reduced rates in its eastern region
by 85 percent. And in Fiji, no-take zones and better management of
marine areas has increased species like mangrove lobsters by 250 percent
per year. Iraq's marshlands have been restored, and local wheat
varieties in Jordan and Syria have been preserved.
Nevertheless, despite these signs of progress, we are failing to
confront the magnitude of the challenge, particularly in the translation
of global agreements into legislation and action at the national and
regional levels. In Bali six months ago, the world achieved a
breakthrough on climate change, and both developed and developing
countries have embarked on a road map towards a new climate regime for
2012. We must become equally committed to reversing the rate of
biodiversity loss.
The Bonn Biodiversity Conference represents an ideal opportunity to
achieve a breakthrough, including on ABS. All of us, not just Africa's
fruit farmers, ultimately depend on nature's bounty for our prosperity -
indeed, for our very survival.
Achim Steiner is the Executive Director of the UN Environment
Programme, Ahmed Djoghlaf is the Executive Secretary of the CBD, and
Sigmar Gabriel is Germany's Environment Minister |