Nations Around The Planet Generally Ignoring Biodiversity Treaty, UN Notes - NYT

[hatrack]

UNITED NATIONS -- Governments are largely ignoring a biodiversity protection treaty they signed 17 years ago, allowing the rate of species decline to continue at an alarming rate, the United Nations said in a report released today. "

The abundance of vertebrate species, based on assessed populations, fell by nearly a third on average between 1970 and 2006 and continues to fall globally," says the report, issued ahead of a top-level meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development this week in New York. "The five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity."

The report does see progress in the creation of preserves, in particular in the number of protected marine areas announced in recent months, but the overall assessment of the treaty by its Montreal-based secretariat paints a grim picture, saying habitat losses have offset gains. Wetlands, salt marshes and habitats for shellfish seem to be suffering the most damage. Nutrients washing off farmland are turning waterways into biological "dead zones," the report says, and ocean acidification and stormwater runoff have made coral reefs "vulnerable to collapse."

The report also sounds the alarm on overfishing, an area where government regulation has been particularly lax and which now threatens the impending collapse of important commercial fish stocks. "This is a time of reckoning for decision makers committed to the global effort to safeguard the variety life on Earth and its contribution to human well-being," Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive director of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) office, writes in a preface to the report. "No country has reported that it will completely meet the 2010 target, and a few Parties have unequivocally stated they will not meet it."

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/05/10/10greenwire-nations-ignoring-biodiversity-treaty-un-says-159.html

[The2ndWheel]

1. "progress in the creation of preserves"

We think we can put nature in a box off to the side, measure it, and balance out what exists there for perfect diversity, since we are the self appointed stewards of the planet. This is where we get into problems.