WHAT will it take to halt the mass die-off of the world’s wildlife?
A united front would certainly be a start. Fourteen years ago the Convention on Biological Diversity made grand proposals for protecting the world’s flora and fauna; but still the treaty is bedevilled by countries arguing over who owns what in nature.
Next, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year project by the world’s top biologists, documented the scale of today’s mass extinctions. Its findings didn’t even make the front pages when they were published 16 months ago. So far governments have ignored the assessment’s key proposal for a permanent monitoring system to measure biodiversity loss.
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This week, conservationists will try again. In a declaration published in Nature, 19 leading biologists from 13 countries are calling for the creation of a new international body – modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – to hard-wire the science of extinction into government policy-making.
Masterminding the strategy is Bob Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank and former chair of the IPCC. “The biodiversity science community has to get organised and advise with one clear voice,” he says.
The threat of extinction is hanging over some 12 per cent of mammals, 23 per cent of birds and 32 per cent of amphibians. “Virtually all aspects of biodiversity are in steep decline,” says Watson. “There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between science and policy to take action.”
“All aspects of biodiversity are in steep decline. We must bridge the gap between science and policy to take action”
To do that, the scientists are proposing an intergovernmental agency that, like the IPCC, is scientifically independent but with a hotline to government. Not all governments are sure they want to join, however. Notably sceptical, say insiders, are rainforest nations such as Brazil and Indonesia. Despite playing host to perhaps half the world’s biodiversity between them, neither has joined the 22 nations so far involved in the discussions. Without them, the proposal is unlikely to work.
Countries such as Brazil are said to be worried that the new scientific body would undermine the authority of the biological diversity convention. The signatories, on the other hand, think the convention is a failure precisely because scientists have not had a big enough input. This, they say, has helped create “an attitude of powerlessness and fatalism” about biodiversity loss.
That could be rectified by a body that sets conservation priorities, says Georgina Mace of the Institute of Zoology in London, one of the signatories. These priorities could include concentrating on forests because of their importance in controlling climate and river flows, or on taking the most cost-effective conservation initiatives.
