THERE is a mass extermination going on, right under our noses. Some have gone so far as to call this extraordinary loss of biodiversity the “sixth extinction”.
At the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, governments agreed to reduce the rate of species loss by 2010. It hasn’t happened. Who will be held to account? Nobody.
This failure will be discussed next week in Nagoya, Japan, at talks on protecting the planet’s species and ecosystems. The disconnect between science and policy has never seemed greater.
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Next year, however, a new initiative should begin. That is when the biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
This move is long overdue and, as the ineffectual efforts to date have underlined, the challenges it faces are colossal.
Rewind the clock 18 years to the headline-grabbing Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Amid much high-flown rhetoric, two crucial deals emerged. The UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity covered the two greatest threats to the future habitability of our planet – global warming and mass extinctions.
Everybody knows about the climate convention. Its work to cap emissions of greenhouse gases, from the Kyoto protocol to last year’s climate-summit debacle in Copenhagen, Denmark, has often been painful. But that is because what is, or is not, agreed makes a difference: climate treaties have the potential to change the way the world works in ways that will affect us all, and for which people could be held to account.
The IPCC has also kept climate negotiators on track with the science. The same cannot be said for parallel talks on protecting biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
These have floundered, often for want of a scientific guide rope. This toothless talking shop has had no measurable impact on how fast we are bulldozing, polluting and hunting nature to oblivion. Its targets are vague and do not hold anybody to anything. They are “not fit for purpose”, according to leading conservation biologist Georgina Mace of Imperial College London.
“This toothless talking shop has had no impact on how fast we are hunting nature to oblivion”
Even CBD deals that possess some traction have backfired. For example, an agreement intended to ensure that poor tropical countries benefit from the economic gains arising from the exploitation of their biodiversity, such as genes and plant extracts turned into medicines or food flavourings, has not triggered the hoped-for collaboration to reap the biodiversity harvest. Instead, it has led to a new biodiversity protectionism that has seen western experts shut out of the rainforests and thrown off research cruises.
We need to do better. Sadly, there is little sign that new targets that may emerge from Nagoya are up to the job. Take “Target 15”, which promises, according to the officialese in recent drafts, that “By 2020, the contribution of biodiversity to ecosystem resilience and to carbon storage and sequestration is enhanced, through conservation and restoration, including restoration of at least 15 per cent of degraded forest landscapes, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation and to combating desertification.” All worthy stuff. But who would police such a target? How would you even know whether or not it had been achieved?
This dog’s breakfast arises because conservation scientists have been sidelined. Diversitas, a network of top conservation scientists such as Mace and Harold Mooney of Stanford University, California, should be at the heart of the drafting process. Instead they complain of being ignored.
They say the biodiversity diplomats lack rigour; that they confuse what we might aesthetically and ethically want from biodiversity – like saving the whales – with what we need to protect ourselves from climate change, floods, famine and epidemics. So, as Mace puts it: “Unlike the equivalent climate process, the CBD has no way of distinguishing technical advice from advocacy.”
There is nothing wrong with wanting to save the whales. Far from it. But it is a qualitatively different aspiration from preserving a coastal mangrove swamp to protect against tropical storms, or maintaining a rainforest as a carbon sink. It would be as well to be clear – especially when we start asking people to pay for that protection.
Thankfully, an “IPCC for biodiversity”, to be called the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, will probably be established at the governing council of UNEP in February next year – 23 years after the IPCC.
How many thousands of species have we lost in that time? Nobody has been counting.