Why hotspots are needed

United Nations conference does little to save biodiversity

That interest in protecting nature has waned globally, stalling progress in negotiations on climate change, was also noticeable in the just-concluded United Nations conference on biodiversity in Hyderabad. All it could manage, and that too after marathon haggling, was to extract higher commitments to funding by developed countries for the national biodiversity protection programmes of developing nations. This will result in doubling the funds from the meagre sums actually spent between 2006 and 2010 by 2015 and maintaining that level till 2020. Even if these pledges are honoured, which is highly doubtful considering the poor realisation of commitments for the proposed global fund for combating climate change, the total resource availability for biodiversity would still be too little to safeguard fast-vanishing regions of biodiversity, leave alone to reverse the damage already done.

 

Little progress has so far been made in meeting the targets agreed to at the last UN biodiversity conference at Nagoya in 2010. These goals, even though insufficient, had bound signatories to reduce the rate of loss of natural habitats by half; conserve 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of marine and coastal areas; and restore biodiversity by up to 15 per cent by 2015. Meeting these targets is estimated to require an investment of at least $200 billion (or over Rs 10.6 lakh crore) every year while the financial commitments made at Hyderabad would result, at best, in mobilising merely half of this amount. On other counts, the Hyderabad summit merely made the usual rhetorical noises on issues such as ecosystem restoration, national capacity building, conservation of marine and wildlife areas and the rights of indigenous people.

Yes, conserving biodiversity is both difficult and expensive. But it’s a task that must be accomplished if the earth’s natural checks and balances are to be sustained as the world moves slowly towards a much-heralded global green economy. With vanishing biodiversity, irreplaceable genetic heritage, crucial to future science and technology, is also lost. A sizeable chunk of natural biodiversity has already been lost for good; much of the rest is in the danger of going the same way. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a quarter of the world’s mammals, about 13 per cent of its birds, nearly 41 per cent of amphibians and one-third of reef-building corals currently face the risk of extinction. Worse still, biodiversity hotspots, terrestrial as well as aquatic, are disappearing or shrinking rapidly. Nearly half of the world’s richest habitats remain entirely unguarded, and even those declared as protected reserves are poorly managed. If the Aichi goal of bringing 17 per cent of biologically significant areas under protection is to be met, an additional six million square kilometres of land and inland waters – twice the size of Argentina – would need to be designated as protected zones. This would require all participating countries to suitably expand their domestic biodiversity conservation programmes — and for rich nations to assist developing countries, home to most of the globe’s biodiversity, in doing so.