Biodiversity Crisis demands Global Action by Tierramérica, Radio Free Europe 7:52pm 18th Oct, 2010   Nagoya, Japan, Oct 18, 2010 (Tierramérica)    What nature gives us is often taken for granted, but if its basic elements disappear, human life on Earth would not be possible. The mission of the biodiversity summit under way in Nagoya, Japan is to reverse the headlong rush towards the precipice.    The 10th Conference of Parties (COP 10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Oct. 18-29 in this southern Japanese city, seeks to create a new set of international agreements to halve the rate of loss of natural habitat, end overfishing, achieve zero net deforestation, eliminate harmful subsidies, and ensure that agriculture is sustainable by 2020, among other goals.    Without a successful meeting in Nagoya achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be impossible, Janez Potoènik, of the European Union''s Commission for the Environment, told a high-level UN meeting last month in New York.    "Biodiversity" is term used to describe the wide variety of the living things that comprise the planet''s biological infrastructure and provide us with health, wealth, food, water, fuel and other vital services.    Many people fail to understand how dependent humanity is on the many natural services provided by nature, says Hal Mooney, an environmental biologist at Stanford University, in California.    "Those services are considered ''free'' and not valued under the current economic structures," Mooney told Tierramérica.    A forest that sequesters carbon, cleans the air, prevents floods, provides food and fuel has no economic value except when it is cut for timber. That has to change and that will be "one of the strongest messages coming out of Nagoya," said Mooney, who just won the 200,000-dollar Volvo Environment Prize for science.    "We need to get the Ministers of Finance and Trade around the world to understand this," he said.    That understanding didn''t happen eight years ago when the Convention member nations pledged to cut species loss "significantly" by 2010, International Year of Biodiversity. With minor exceptions, the rates of species loss increased instead of decreasing.    Nearly a quarter of plant species are threatened with extinction, corals and amphibians are in sharp decline, the abundance of all vertebrates has fallen by one-third in the past 30 years, according to the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (GBO 3), the most current assessment of the state of the planet''s biodiversity.    The trends are almost all negative, the declines exponential and potential tipping points loom, warned Lovejoy, chief biodiversity advisor to the president of the World Bank, and head of the global scientific review.    "Now''s the time to get serious... We have to take the GBO3 as a huge wake up call," he said in a Tierramérica interview when the report was released in May.    In Lovejoy''s view, we are experiencing the sixth great extinction event of all life on Earth.    The Nagoya COP 10 meetings will be high-pressure, "all or nothing" negotiations on extremely complex issues, but there is wide consensus on the goals for 2020, said a source at the CBD secretariat.    However, there is much less agreement on the details. A major obstacle is financing for conservation, which needs to increase 10- or even 100-fold to be able to reach the 2020 goals, said the source.    It takes money to protect, conserve and enhance biodiversity. Currently, about three billion dollars annually in overseas development aid goes to help developing countries that are rich in plants and animals but poor in financial and technical resources.    To reach the new 2020 goals, that assistance from developed nations will have to jump to at least 30 billion, and up to 300 billion dollars a year, but "it is a significant challenge for governments to provide that level of financing," the spokesperson said.    A preparatory CBD meeting in Nairobi last May ended in a North vs. South deadlock on the issue of finance. Delegates in Nairobi left it up to the world leaders attending the Nagoya summit to make the final financing decision.    Many countries are hoping the corporate sector and private donors will become major players in providing financing through programs that pay for ecosystem services or the creation of carbon and biodiversity offset markets, like the proposed REDD+, which adds biodiversity to the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plan.    "We cannot have the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity without the full engagement of the business community," Ahmed Djoghlaf, CBD executive secretary, told Tierramérica in an email.    "The idea that only governments and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) can succeed in protecting biodiversity has demonstrated its limit," Djoghlaf wrote.    The industrialised countries can afford to increase their public financial commitment 10-fold, since they spend more than 500 billion dollars a year subsidising the fossil fuel industry, says the CBD Alliance. Moreover, during the 2008 economic crisis, some 6.9 trillion dollars was mobilised to bail out banks and other private financial institutions.    Without new and additional financial resources it will be impossible to implement the CBD''s plans or achieve its 2020 goals, states the coalition.    (Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank).    Oct. 2010    UN Conference confronts dramatic loss of Biodiversity, by Antoine Blua. (Radio Free Europe)    Delegates from 193 nations have opened a UN meeting in Japan to discuss how to address Earth''s dramatic loss of animal and plant species.    At its opening, Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program, told delegates the meeting is "part of the world''s efforts to address a very simple fact -- we are destroying life on Earth."    A key task facing the 8,000 delegates is to hammer out a set of strategic goals to prevent the further loss of species over the next 10 years.    Experts, such as Jonathan Bailie, director of conservation programs at the Zoological Society of London, doubt the discussions will result in an ambitious, comprehensive international agreement featuring binding targets. But Bailie says that he expects the talks to reveal a growing agreement among governments about the need to place a price on the goods and services that nature provides.    "Traditionally conservationists have focused on moral or ethical reasons as to why we want to save biodiversity," Bailie says. "But it''s becoming increasingly apparent that if we don''t put a value on things, then often the wrong market decisions are made. For example, if trees are worth less standing than they are [worth] cut down, they will be cut down."    Disappearing Species    The UN says the world has failed to reach the goal, set in 2002, of a "significant reduction" in species losses by 2010 -- named as the International Year of Biodiversity.    Biologists warn that species are disappearing at up to 1,000 times the natural rate of wildlife loss. More than one-fifth of the world''s plant species and terrestrial vertebrates are threatened with extinction.    The threat concerns one-third of freshwater fish species. This is mainly due to habitat destruction; expansion of agriculture; deforestation; overexploitation of biological resources such as fish; invasive species; and, on top of that, climate change.    The annual economic cost of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss is estimated at trillions of dollars -- equivalent to as much as 10 percent of global gross domestic product.    Speaking on September 22 at a summit in New York on the species crisis, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cautioned that biological diversity is closely linked to the world economy.    "Maintaining and restoring our natural infrastructure," Ban said, "can provide economic gains worth trillions of dollars each year. Allowing it to decline is like throwing money out of the window."    Unless steps are taken to reverse the loss of biological diversity, scientists warn that natural habitats will be degraded and eventually destroyed, threatening a wide range of benefits such as clean water, pure air, healthy soil, adequate food, fuel, and protection from extreme weather events.    This loss will most directly affect the well-being of the world''s poorest and most vulnerable people.    In Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, the destruction of forests due to the cutting of trees for fuel, cattle grazing, and land cultivation is affecting the lives of residents -- causing land degradation and erosion that lead to mudslides, landslides, and flooding.    In an effort to break the vicious circle, Bailie says policy makers are to investigate mechanisms designed to ensure governments value ecosystem services that have previously been regarded as free.    Meanwhile, stronger pressure is to be put on businesses to measure the financial costs associated with their impact on the environment.    "With the toxic sludge in Hungary and the recent oil spills and so on," Bailie says, "people are realizing that business is having a serious impact on biodiversity, and that business needs to be more accountable and business needs to maintain the resources that they are custodians of sustainably."    "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" survey, to be released at the Nagoya conference, is expected to show that there is a strong case for businesses to take action to limit activities that harm biological diversity and to incorporate environmental impacts into their risk management.    Speaking last week at a roundtable hosted by consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, Jon Williams, partner at PWC''s sustainability and climate change team, said that besides physical risks to operations and supply chains, such as soil degradation and water shortages, businesses were facing investor risks.    Such risks were highlighted by the recent experience of BP, which has seen its share price halved as a result of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.    Williams said increasing numbers of institutional investors are starting to call on firms to report on the biodiversity threats they face and to change their investment practices with new environmental and social standards.    But PWC this year released a report warning that the vast majority of the world''s largest companies are ignoring environmental threats.    The report found that only six of the world''s largest 100 companies had measures in place to reduce their impact on biodiversity and environmental habitats and just two had identified biodiversity as a strategic risk. 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