Nations pledge to stop extinctions

A poster at the conference shows off the benefits of biodiversity Keystone

Environment officials from 100 countries have wrapped up an international conference in Malaysia with a pledge to prevent the loss of animal and plant species.

Delegates to the United Nations-backed conference on biodiversity signed a joint declaration stating their intention to preserve ecosystems threatened by human activity.

UN officials say at least 60,000 species of animals and plants die out each year, largely as a result of industrialisation, logging, over-fishing and other commercial activities.

The declaration signed at the end of the two-week conference in Kuala Lumpur stated that countries would take steps to “more effectively and coherently” implement measures that would significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

It included protecting the rights of indigenous people, the creation of a global network of protected areas, and controlled access to genetic resources with a fair sharing of money made from those resources.

But environmental activists criticised the document for being short on substance, since it contained no formal commitment by wealthy nations to contribute more money for conservation programs in poorer countries.

Reacting to the criticism, the Swiss ambassador for the environment, Beat Nobs, said the point of the meeting was not to raise funds, but to raise awareness of the need to protect biodiversity.

“Countries are starting to understand that without the protection of biodiversity – that means nature, ecosystems – the world will find it very difficult to develop in a sustainable manner,” Nobs told swissinfo.

Short-sighted

He added that criticisms were “a bit short-sighted… because at the end of last year more money was made available for the Global Environment Facility. It now has around $3 billion, of which between 30 and 35 per cent will have to be used for biodiversity.”

More than 2,000 government officials, scientists and environmentalists took part in the conference – the seventh of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity – a non-binding treaty, which sets out goals, policies and general obligations.

The convention was agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and discussed again ten years later at the Johannesburg Earth summit, where countries agreed to try to reverse the decline by 2010 – but failed to set out concrete measures.

Urgency

Greenpeace International spokesman, Shane Rattenbury, said the ministers’ declaration in Kuala Lumpur lacked details, and that “nothing we saw in the statement reflected the urgency of conservation goals”.

Nobs acknowledged that the targets set in Johannesburg would not be reached. “It is absolutely clear that, by 2010 we will not achieve the targets we had hoped to. It’s an overall target that we are trying to reach by 2010 and no country has concrete targets as for example in the Kyoto Protocol [on climate change].”

Nobs added that part of the problem was that the precise effect of human activity on biodiversity remained very difficult to quantify.

“As opposed to climate change, biodiversity assessment still needs to be improved. For instance, it is very difficult to define what all the interdependencies are among the various elements of ecosystems.”

A key complaint of activists is that rich governments are not providing financial help to poorer countries to help them create national parks and sustainable infrastructure.

Finance

Rattenbury of Greenpeace told reporters at the conference that about $25 billion was needed to finance additional protected areas in developing countries.

Nobs agreed that money was needed. “Only if there are economic incentives will it be possible in the long run to protect natural environments in developing countries where the population pressure and the economic pressure is so high.”

But he said investment in research was just as pressing. “Least developed countries need access to state-of-the-art technologies as well as other assistance to deal with those issues.

“For that reason, it is important that we increase our efforts in research because even for us it’s not quite clear what all the interdependencies are with regard to biodiversity –it’s a very complex thing.”

Commenting at the end of the ministerial meeting on Thursday, the German environment minister, Jurgen Trittin, said rich nations were “convinced that the developing world needs more money for conservation” but they need time to identify genuinely worthy cases.

swissinfo, Vanessa Mock and Jonas Hughes

Key facts

The declaration pledged to:
protect the rights of indigenous people;
create a global network of protected areas;
control access to genetic resources with a fair sharing of money made from those resources.